Bus to Venice

 I don't know why I didn't post this picture earlier - or, for that matter, why I'm posting it now - but I was scrolling through pictures on my phone and stumbled across it (and it made me happy). When you fly into the airport in Venice you need to take public transportation into the city, as you would any other large city in Europe, although, of course, in this instance that would require a boat. I mean, on one hand you know this to be the case, but it's still funny/odd/wonderful when you actually do it.

Janet, a good soul, tried to buy the ticket in advance on line, although we knew in our heart of hearts that it wouldn't actually work - and, of course, it didn't. So she bought more tickets on the spot, which was sort of a metaphor for what turned out to be a crazy expensive trip. And I don't begrudge the Venetians one euro.

2025 Readings 47

 This year I finished my second Ursula K. Le Guin novel of the year, The Left Hand of Darkness. Like its predecessor, The Dispossessed, I read this one as part of an unofficial book club that we have going. Why we started out with two Le Guin novels is the result of an odd series of events that I'm sure I laid out in my earlier discussion. I'm happy to have read both, and not simply because one of my goals in this year of expanded reading is to tackle books that I normally wouldn't.  I don't know if I liked The Left Hand of Darkness as much as I liked The Dispossessed, although that opinion was reversed through the first third of Darkness. At a certain point it felt like it transitioned into a Jack London book as the two main characters embarked on a tortuous trek across an icy terrain, which was interesting but didn't add to the story as much as it might have. The observations on gender are quite fascinating, especially so when you consider that the book is now over fifty years old. Recommended.

Destinations Real and Imagined

 I think I mentioned recently that I was booted out of my long-time campus residency in Aiken Hall, which is being turned back into a dorm after many years of being the home for the Core Division. I've now moved across the quad to Wick Hall, which is definitely a step down. I'm not taking it too hard, actually, because while some of my colleagues have only known Aiken, my new office in Wick will be my sixth office in four different building over the last quarter-century. I'm still sharing an office space with my great friend Erik, which means more daily discussions of film directors we admire and film actresses we love. We both could have chosen single offices, but we get along so well that we decided to keep with a double. Initially we were considering moving down the hill to Coolidge Hall, but it was actually a terrible fit for my declining health. Of course, I was too vain to see that, but Erik, being a great friend and and an all-around good guy, gently proposed that Wick was better for his schedule. Clearly, he was looking out for me, which I immediately picked up on and appreciated. It was a more politically astute equivalent to Mike Kelly, in response to me carrying a couch through the side yard when we were moving me into the cabin, saying: "Don't be an asshole." Truthfully, I appreciated Mike's honesty, and that's become a go-to phrase when vanity needs to be dispelled.

When I arrived in Wick I found a set of clocks in the hallway, which was clearly the work of Erik (all clever and anonymous schemes are designed by him). I love that Rising Sun and Lisbon are recognized. It warms my heart to think that my friends care enough about me to figure out the time of day for me in Portugal, even if they, at least temporarily, will begrudge the fact that while they're trudging off to teach nitwits I'll be sitting at a cafe reading and drinking sangria.

My aunt Connie asked how people know that I'm from Rising Sun (or at least I claim Rising Sun for my hometown) and I told her that I've built that up into such a mythology over the years that everyone knows it. Of course, she played an active, if innocent, role in that mythology by sending me so much Rising Sun swag over the years.

Femme Fatale

I love this picture of my daughter-in-law Ali that popped up in Seven Days. I told her she looked like a femme fatale from a classic film noir. I love that kid.

Ali McGuirk in Out of the Past.

2025 Readings 46

 I'm happy that the Northshire Bookstore put up the new New York Review Books carousel, because it has introduced me to some works that I would not have normally stumbled across (thus, it achieved its goal). Last night I finished Antonio De Benedetto's The Suicides. I don't know if I loved it, but I liked it a lot, and it's one of those books that you know, while you're reading it, that there's a world just beyond what you're understanding and that another reading is required/desired. It's the story of a reporter and his small crew who are investigating a series of suicides, which may or may not be connected. Along the way it turns into a brief discussion of what different thinkers over the centuries have thought about suicide. These are usually delivered by Bibi, an assistant to the unnamed reporter. For example:

REJECTERS

Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Luther, Calvin, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Napoleon . . .

Albert Camus: "From the absurd, I derive three consequences: my rebellion, my freedom, my passion. Through no more than the play of consciousness, I transform what was an inspiration to death into a rule for living: and I reject suicide."

Kant: "Suicide is abominable because God forbids it. God forbids it because it is abominable."

Jaime Balmes: "The fundamental reason for the immorality of suicide is that man thereby disturbs the natural order, destroying a thing over which has has no dominion. We merely have usufruct of life,  we do not own it; it has been granted to us to eat of the fruits of the tree but with suicide we take the liberty of cutting it down."

ACCEPTERS

Confucius, Buddha, Diogenes, Seneca, Montaigne, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hegel, Nietzsche . . .

Hegesias of Cyrene, in this philosophical school in Alexandria, encouraged suicide among his disciples. With some success.

The Stoics were defenders of man's free will and prescribed suicide as the remedy for any woe.

Schopenhauer: "There is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person."

Nietzsche: "One should live in such a way that one may have the will to di at the right time." "Suicide as ordinary mode of death, with the suicide the new pride of mankind; he fixes the moment of his own death and makes a celebration out of dying." "The thought of suicide is a great consolation . . ." "Let there be no regret; suicide is quicker."

As I'm sure I've discussed here before, there has never been a time when I seriously considered suicide. I feel sorrow when anyone commits suicide, but I don't think that they will pay some price in an afterworld for that decision. Maybe that's vanity on my part for assuming that I understand what's going to happen after death, but I guess I would argue that anyone who is sure they know that suicides will suffer some torment because of their deeds, basing their decision on ancient and textually problematic religious documents, is guilty of the same vanity. No one can know the pain of another, we can only try and alleviate it.

The Liminality of Eros

 There is no post here other than the fact that I wanted to record "the liminality of Eros," which Sanford Zale said yesterday at our weekly Breakfast of Excellence at the TASTee Grill. It was witnessed by Erik, Kevin, and yours truly. We have no idea what he was talking about - and, truthfully, he was mainly talking smack - but we thought it should be recorded so that Sanford gets credit in the dictionaries and encyclopedias when this becomes the academic jargon of the day.

2025 Readings 45

 Last night I finished Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado, one of the books I picked up at Northshire Bookstore a couple weeks ago (which I'm tearing through). This book has come in and out of popularity since it was published in the late 1950s, and I can certainly see why it has hung around. It's a favorite of my good friend Sheila, and I asked her if, when she was overseas, that everyone called her Sally Jay Gorce (she said it had become a copyright issue). It's the story of SJG, a young woman living in Paris and her misadventures. It's funny, but there's also an essential truth in it as well that runs deeper. Highly recommended.

This Universe I Am for Myself

    Nostalgia! I even feel it for people and things that were nothing to me, because time's fleeing is for me an anguish, and life's mystery is a torture. Faces I habitually see on my habitual streets - if I stop seeing them I become sad. And they were nothing to me, except perhaps the symbol of all of life.

   The nondescript old man, with dirty gaiters who often crossed my path at nine-thirty in the morning . . . The crippled seller of lottery tickets who would pester me in vain . . . The round and ruddy old man smoking a cigar at the door of the tobacco shop . . . The pale tobacco shop owner . . . What has happened to them all, who because I regularly saw them were a part of my life? Tomorrow I woo will vanish from  Rua da Prata, the Rua dos Douradoes, the Rua dos Fanqueiros. Tomorrow I too - I this soul that feels and thinks, this universe I am for myself - yes, tomorrow I too will be the one who no longer walks these streets, whom others will vaguely evoke with a 'What's become of him?' And everything I've done, everything I've felt and everything I've lived will amount merely to one less passer-by on the everyday streets of some city or other.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 481

These are the last two paragraphs of The Book of Disquiet, or at least Richard Zenith's interpretation of what constitutes the core of The Book of Disquiet. As I discussed previously, I'm trying to finish my paper for the upcoming conference in Lisbon, so I've been spending a lot of time in writing by and about Fernando Pessoa. Considering where I am in my career - and life - it's not surprising that this passage would jump out at me so meaningfully; I mean, The Book of Disquiet - and "this universe I am for myself" - both have to end. I'm sure that this feeling is what made it so relatively easy to decide to head over to Ramallah for Mahmoud's wedding. I remember when I left Georgia Perimeter College (it's hard to believe I taught there for nine years) the provost, who was very nice, told me that I'd be missed and if I wanted to come back I'd be welcomed with open arms. Obviously, it's not true (even if it was a sweet thing to say), not simply because full-time positions require a national search, but also because no one is so important that they won't be forgotten in a year or less. One of the reasons why I want to walk away from Champlain without any fuss, essentially disappearing like a ghost, is because I don't want to go through the hypocrisy of pretending that anyone will actually miss me - or even remember that I taught there in no time at all.

An Overseas Wedding

 Yesterday I received my official email invitation for my former student Mahmoud's upcoming wedding to his fiancée Sireen (who I am looking forward to meeting). They're getting married in September in Ramallah in the West Bank, and he was kind enough to invite me. He's easily one of my all-time favorite students, and he's popped up now and again in this blog. Janet and I had taken a No Foreign Travel oath for this year so that we could wipe out some debt (although, even though it was my idea originally, I'm the one who was already failing on that front), how could we possibly miss out on the opportunity to spend that magical day with him? I remember years and years ago inviting his family, who was visiting, out to the house I used to have in South Burlington. They are such great folks and it will be a pleasure to see them again. It will be Janet's first visit to the Middle East, so she's already excited about the trip and nothing has been planned so far. Obviously, more will be said about this in the months to come.

2025 Readings 44

    "The first time something happens out there, and you start on me," I said, "I'm taking off for Oakland City, Indiana. Why don't we stop all this horsing around and just send me to another ball club?"

   "I won't do it," he says. "I've been trying to get you back ever since I traded you away a long time ago. Now you're either going to play for me or you're not going to play ball at all. I'm sure not going to let you go a second time."

   "OK," I said, "if that's the way you feel about it. If you give me my salary, I'll try it. But I still say I'll be back in Oakland City, Indiana, in ten days."

   "How much do you want?"

   "$25,000."

   "I can't pay it."

   Well, I took my hat and started for the door. "Where do you think you're going? he says.

   "Back to Oakland City, Indiana. Why?"

   "Now, hold on," he says. "Come back and sit down. I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll give you a three-year contract for $70,000."

   "All right," I said, "I'll take it."

   I signed the contract, went out to the ball park, got into a uniform, and played six innings that afternoon. Got two hits out of three times up, too.

   I play that three-year contract out, and after that I quit, and finally did come back to Oakland City, Indiana. McGraw kept to his word and never bothered me. But it wasn't like playing in Cincinnati. I missed my teammates, and I missed the Cincinnati fans.

   I've read where as far as the Cincinnati fans are concerned I'm the most popular player ever wore a Reds' uniform. I don't know about that. It's not for me to say. But - assuming it's true - I'll tell you one thing: the feeling is mutual.

Edd Roush arguing with John McGraw, the New York Giants manager

Recently I've read some wonderful books that I just plowed through in absolutely no time at all, and this morning I finished another one of them: Lawrence Ritter's The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It. It's considered a classic baseball book, and the praise is warranted. The story behind the book is that after Ty Cobb's death in 1961, it suddenly became very clear to Ritter, a college professor, that an entire generation of early baseball players would pass from the earth without anyone bothering to tell their story. This inspired Ritter to travel around the country and record the stories of a couple dozens players about their experience playing in the late 19th century and early 20th century. The story is presented in their own words, and it is a wonderful book. It's just a series of players, long-retired, some Hall of Famers and some who might have sadly been forgotten without Ritter's effort, simply telling stories of baseball and their lives then. It's been argued that four of the players probably later ended up in the Hall of Fame because of this book.

For example, here's the opening of Rube Marquard's chapter:

   My nickname being what it is, you probably automatically assume I must have  been a country boy. That's what most people figure. But it's not so. Fact is, my father was the Chief Engineer of the city of Cleveland, and that's where I was born and reared.

   Then how come I'm called "Rube"? Well, I'll get to that. But let me tell you about my father first. Like I say, he was the Chief Engineer of the city of Cleveland. As far as he was concerned, the only important thing was for me to get a good education. But as far back as I can remember all I could think of, morning, noon, and night, was baseball.

   "Now listen," Dad would say, "I want you to cut this out and pay attention to your studies. I want you to go to college when you're through high school, and I don't want any foolishness about it. Without an education you won't be able to get a good job, and then you'll never amount to anything." 

   "I already have a job," I'd say.

   "You've got a job? What are you talking about?"

   "I'm going to be a ballplayer."

   "A ballplayer?" he'd say, and throw his hands up in the air. "What do you mean? How can you make a living being a ballplayer? I don't understand why a grown man would wear those funny-lookin suits in the first place."

   "Well," I'd answer, "you see policemen with uniforms on, and other people like that. They change after they're through working. It's the same way with ballplayers."

   "Ha! Do ballplayers get paid?"

It sounds like every conversation between every father and every son since the beginning of time. It's also a fascinating study of the social and economic world of the time, with so many of these players making obscenely low wages working in the mines for seventy hours a week - and some of them riding the rails to get to tryouts because they had no money. I can't recommend it too highly. The funny thing is, I don't even watch baseball anymore. I used to love the game with a childlike fascination, but over the years it fell away (which is why I finish last in my fantasy baseball league year in and year out). Baseball has always played a key role in the American dream, and now it does in a terrible fashion: the gross inequality that is destroying America is played out routinely in MLB, with small market teams like the Reds acting as little more than homecoming team pushovers for the wealthy teams. That said, I still love going to see minor league or college league (like our beloved Vermont Lake Monsters) games because the game itself, in its purest form, is a thing of beauty.

Why We Can Love The Saint

 I weep over my imperfect pages, but if future generations read them, they will be more touched by my weeping than by any perfection I might have achieved, since perfection would have kept me from weeping and, therefore, from writing. Perfection never materializes. The saint weeps, and is human, God is silent. That is why we can love the saint but cannot love God.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 64

I'm trying to put the finishing touches on the paper for the upcoming conference in Lisbon, which has me inundated in various works by and about Fernando Pessoa. Of course, this also is distracting me from the epics book, which makes perfect sense because I chose Pessoa as the subject for a couple presentations simply to try and kickstart my writing; as the old saying goes, "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans." Nevertheless "forcing" yourself to reread The Book of Disquiet is never a bad thing, and this passage, already heavily noted from previous reading, jumped out at me again. Now, I'll never achieve perfection in my writing, although at this point I'd settle for something akin to gross competence. This weekend we drove down to see Janet's mom for Mother's Day, and that can always be a challenge. In the end, it, with a couple bumps along the way, went pretty well. On the way home, as part of the inevitable debrief, I proposed that we had all done the best we could, and thinking about it seemed to make Janet very happy. "The saint weeps, and is human. God is silent."

2025 Readings 43

 My old friend Doug, who was my best friend in graduate school, used to opine that you should never buy anything from a store with the word "World" in it. In my highly flawed memory he had gone to a store called ComputerWorld and it had ended badly. However, the more I think about this memory the more I realize that this is either a deeply flawed memory or the entire story from beginning to end was apocryphal. Anyway, I guess the point is that you should be suspicious of your sources, so even if the particular story is flawed it doesn't diminish the essential truth of the story. With that in mind, I'll add another essential truism: never read a book that was promoted by Oprah.com. As part of this year of giving myself less guiltily over to extended reading, I'm also, as I've previously mentioned, reading books that I would not normally read. With that in mind, on the previous trip to Northshire Bookstore I picked up a copy of Nina George's The Little Paris Bookshop (so maybe, after all, this is Northshire's fault). It was described as a book for booklovers, and who doesn't love Paris? Anyway, it's pretty dreadful. Fran Lebowitz famously proposed that, "Donald Trump is a stupid man's idea of a smart man, a poor man's idea of a rich man, and a weak man's idea of a strong man." Sadly, I think that The Little Paris Bookshop is a non-booklover's idea of what a booklover would write (or want to read). It has moments of wild coincidence that Charles Dickens would have made work - and moments of clumsy magical realism that Gabriel Garcia Marquez would have made sing - but none of it works in this book. 

2025 Readings 42

 OK, so this is not a book that I finished in a day, although, considering its length, I still blew through it fairly quickly. On our last trip to the library in Montpelier I checked out Robert Service's Lenin: A Biography. I've always had a bit of a man-crush on Lenin, mainly because I find him and his age fascinating. The biography didn't disappointed, although I think it would have benefitted from another hundred pages of so, devoted to events such as the actual events of the takeover of power, his conflict with Stalin, or the New Economic Policy; these were all discussed, but a deeper dive would have made it an even richer experience. This led to a discussion over the breakfast table this morning over the balancing act in biographies between evenly running through the subject's life and focusing in more deeply on a couple key moments or themes. Again, I liked this biography a lot and would definitely recommend it to others, but I do think it would have benefitted from a little more granularity in some key areas. In the end I came away with a sense that Lenin was even more of a prick than I thought he was, but there are people who accomplish extraordinary things in extraordinary ages, and seldom are they pleasant people. There were some very human moments in the story, however, and one that jumped out to me was his reaction to the death of his one-time mistress and long-time Bolshevik colleague, Inessa Armand:

     "Inessa called herself a 'living corpse'; it was not only cholera but also a broken heart that did for her. Ten days late she contemplated the meaning of her life:

For romantics, love holds the first place in a person's life. It's higher than anything else. And until recently I was far nearer to such a notion than I am not. True, for me love was never the only thing. Alongside love there was public activity. And both in my life and in the past there have been not a few instances where I've sacrificed my happiness and my love for the good of the cause. But previously it used to seem that love had a significant equal to that of public activity. Now it's not like that. The significance of love in comparison with public activity becomes quite small and cannot bear comparison with public activity.

On the point of death, she tried to persuade herself that her work for the Revolution meant more to her than the man she loved.

    "The matter-of-fact official telegram to Lenin cut him to the quick: 'It has been impossible to save Comrade Inessa Armand who was ill with cholera. She died on 24 September. We are accompanying the body to Moscow. Lenin had been responsible for her convalescing in the chaotic Caucasus rather than in France, and now she had perished there. It took a fortnight before her body was brought back in a leaden coffin to Moscow. The train arrived in the early hours of 11 October, and the cortege made its way from the railway station after dawn. Lenin and Nadezhda Konstantinovna (his wife) had been waiting at the station. As the cortege neared the capital's centre, Lenin was obviously overcome with grief. Nadezhda Konstantinovna understood, and gripped him by the arm to hold him up. No one could forget the pitiful condition of the man. The young Bolshevik Yelizaveta Drabkina watched the horse-drawn hearse and the draped black flag: 'There was something inexpressibly sad about his drooping shoulders and lowly bent head.' Angelica Balabanova had the same impression at the funeral: 'I never saw such torment; I never saw any human being so completely absorbed by sorrow, by the effort to keep it for himself, to guard it against the attention of others, as if that awareness could have diminished the intensity of his feeling.'

    "Lenin did not record his feelings on paper. He had given up many pleasures for 'the cause': material comfort, profession, chess, classical music, and cycling. He had avoided a permanent association with Inessa: the Revolution for him was always dominant. But he grieved deeply when her corpse was delivered from Nalchik.

    "By his side were friends and associates who thought that he was never the same again. Some said that he would have lived longe had he not lost Inessa. Shaken he certainly was; yet he had not lost the power of his will. Since 1912 he had accustomed himself to living apart from her. He could also cope with the froideurs of Nadya. Throughout his career he displayed an ability to be undistracted the matters of the heart. Usually it had been his physical health of his polemics that had thrown him off balance. 'Romance' did not get in his way, and Inessa's death did not destroy him. If his external reaction is any guide, he was hurt worse than by any other event since his brother's execution in 1887. But he quickly recovered. He had an enormous capacity for emotional self-suppression. He loved politics and lived for the political life He was fixated by the importance of ideas. He was not a robot and did not deny, at least to himself, the benefits of a deep relationship, but personal love - the love of a man for a woman - was secondary to him, and, if politics so demanded, he thought he could survive without it."

 Robert Service also wrote biographies of Stalin and Trotsky, so I suspect I'll be reading more of his books in the future.

2025 Readings 41

 Over the weekend Janet and I drove down to Massachusetts to see her mom for Mother's Day, which meant that we ended up stopping at the Northshire Bookstore not once, but twice. And so, nine books later, and that was just my haul, Janet's was slightly larger (clearly, we have a problem). To be fair, the return trip on Sunday was entirely my idea, with my only excuse being that the bookstore had a 20% off sale for members. Of course, I will regret all of this when we're in the process of moving overseas and I need to store or rehouse or give away hundreds of books (but that's another post). 

One of the books I picked up was Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World, which was absolutely wonderful. I bought it Saturday early afternoon, and even considering travel and plans for most of Saturday evening and Sunday, I still finished it last night. It's mainly straight history, but at times slides into a novelistic retelling of the history. It tells several related stories of scientists and mathematicians and their roles in revolutionary changes, but also what lunatics they often were - so, come for the math and science and stay for the sex, drugs, and religious visions - or come for the sex, drugs, and religious visions and stay for the math and science. Either way, this is highly recommended.

2025 Readings 40

 OK, so I'm essentially cheating here. In between teaching a class in the spring that featured Fernando Pessoa - and giving two talks (the Philosophy Week presentation and the upcoming talk I'm giving in Portugal) - I ended up reading The Book of Disquiet from beginning to end (as compared to just occasionally dipping into it need be for the class and the presentations). So shoot me. Sorry, it's just a great, great book, and, as I've mentioned several times, The Book of Disquiet is definitely the book of my 60s. However, since I have a separate thread simply based on my reflections on Pessoa's work (see Disquiet on the right side of the screen) I don't know what I have to say here, other than the fact that you should all read the book - and read it repeatedly.

2025 Readings 39

 I just finished a reread (or, I guess to be more accurate, a re-listen) to Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, which I first read only a couple years ago. It's a novel that I'm sure I will read again - and hopefully again - over the next few years. And in this case I do mean read, as compared to listen to it on Audible, not simply because of my growing opposition to All Things Amazon, but also because I think, in this case, the recorded version doesn't do complete justice to the novel. It's not that it's bad, because it's not, but he presents the main protagonist, "our hero," Hans Castorp in a more agitated state that I imagine him to be; essentially, I internally "hear" Hans slower than he is presented in the audio version. If you have the chance to listen to it on Audible definitely take the opportunity because it's a great novel and a very good performance, but I think I want to tackle it as it was intended next time. 

On this visit to the International Sanatorium Berghof I found that I loved the sections I initially oved even more - and disliked the sections I initially loved - even more. It is a wonderful novel, and I warmed to it in a way that I never warmed to Death in Venice (although I've tackled that much shorter work at three different periods in my life) - inexplicably, I've not read Buddenbrooks (although that's in the queue for this year of reading). My other discovery on this reading was how much I feel that I am, in fact, Hans Castorp, and not simply because of our shared mediocrity. It may relate to my time at Champlain coming to an end, but I've been thinking about how Hans came to the sanatorium to visit his cousin for a planned trip of three weeks and ended up staying for seven years - whereas I came to Champlain with the thought of of staying two years and stayed for over a quarter-century. Like Hans, I'm perpetually torn between - and always trying to reconcile - different philosophical structures (although mine, unlike Hans - he didn't live as long - are consistently redefining themselves). Plus, I think the two of us were consistently misdiagnosed over the years, and thus had too much time stolen from us.

Anyway, I really love the novel and heartily recommend anyone to take on the challenge of reading it - it is a difficult novel, but also a beautiful one. Let me share a brief section, which will give you a sense of the flow of the novel. I was going to share the section where Hans's cousin Joachim dies - or the very end where Hans will almost certain die - but instead here's the beginning of Chapter 7, where Mann shares how long Hans was actually in the sanatorium, which then slides into a discussion of time and literature (which is very typical of Mann):

   Can one narrate time - time as such, in and of itself? Most certainly not, what a foolish undertaking that would be. The story would go: "Time passed, ran on, flowed in a mighty stream," and on and on in the same vein. No one with any common sense could call that a narrative. It would be the same as if someone took the harebrained notion of holding a single note or chord for hours on end - and called it music. Because a story is like music in that it fills time, "fills it up so nice and properly," "divides it up," so that there is "something to it," "something going on" - to quote, with the melancholy reverence one shows to statements made by the dead, a few casual comments of the late Joachim, phrases that faded away long ago, and we are not sure if the reader is quite clear just how long ago that was. Time is the element of narration, just as it is the element of time - is inextricably bound up with it, as bodies are in space. It is also the element of music, which itself measures and divides time, making it suddenly diverting and precious; and related to music, as we have noted, is the story, which also can only present itself in successive events, as movement toward an end (and not as something suddenly, brilliantly present, like a work of visual art, which is pure body bound to time), and even if it would try to be totally here in each moment, would still need time for its presentation.

   That much is perfectly obvious. But that there is a difference is equally clear. The time element of music is singular: a segment of human earthly existence in which is gushes forth, thereby ineffably enhancing and ennobling life. Narrative, however, has two kinds of time: first, its own real time, which like musical time defines its movement and presentation; and second, the time of its contents, which has a perspective quality that can vary widely, from a story in which the narrative's imaginary time is almost, or indeed totally coincident with its musical time, to one in which it stretches out over light-years. A musical piece entitled "Five Minute Waltz" last five minutes - this and only this defined its relationship to time. A story whose contents involved a time span of five minutes, however, could, by means of an extraordinary scrupulosity in filing up those five minutes, last a thousand time as long - and still remain short on boredom, although in relationship to its imaginary time it would be very long in the telling. On the other hand it is possible for a narrative's content-time to exceed its own duration immeasurably. This is accomplished by diminishment - and we use this term to describe an illusory, or, to be quite explicit, diseased element, that is obviously pertinent here: diminishment occurs to some extent whenever a narrative makes use of hermetic magic and a temporal hyper-perspective reminiscent of certain anomalous experiences of reality that imply that the senses have been transcended. The diaries of opium-eaters record how, during the brief period of ecstasy, the drugged person's dreams have a temporal scope of ten, thirty, sometimes sixty years or even surpass all limits of man's ability to experience time - dreams, that is, whose imaginary time span vastly exceeds their actual duration and which are characterized by an incredible diminishment of the experience of time, with images thronging past so swiftly that, as one hashish-smoker puts it, the intoxicated user's brain seems "to have had something removed, like the mainspring from a broken watch." 

   A narrative, then, can set to work and deal with time in much the same way as those depraved dreams. But since it can "deal" with time, it is clear that time, which is the element of the narrative, can also become its subject; and although it would be going too far to say that one can "narrate time" it is apparently not such an absurd notion to want to narrate about time - so that a term like "time novel" may well take on an oddly dreamlike double meaning. And indeed we posed the question about whether one could narrate time precisely in order to say that we actually have some like that in mind with this ongoing story. . . .

In Praise of KA

 My friend Kevin possesses many virtues, and not just his hidden love of the CFL. As I've proposed several times, no doubt, he's also a fantastic cook. Last week he whipped up some shrimp and grits with chorizo. Marcelle, Kevin, and I wolfed it down after my last final of the season, which was a wonderful way to end an utterly dreary semester.

It was, seriously, one of the best meals I've ever had in my entire life.

In Praise of SW

 I wanted to post this picture of my great friend Steve, which I snapped last week during Finals Week. He teaches a first year class that features martial arts, and during the final exam period he brings the students out into the quad and has them break thin boards. If nothing else it gives them some exercise and sunshine, but, more importantly, he takes the opportunity to build up their self-esteem. He has them write perceived obstacles on the boards before breaking them, and then encourages them to keep the boards throughout their time here at Champlain so that they can remind themselves of how they can defeat their demons.

Steve pumping up the students. He, unfairly, never gets the credit he deserves for being a very talent teacher who is utterly devoted to this students.

2025 Readings 38

 It seems like I've fallen behind in my readings, which would make sense because I just plowed through the end of the semester, but actually it's because I've been in the middle of some massive books: Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, and Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography, and Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls. I finished the third of the three on Sunday night. Murakami has a special place in my heart, partially because I will always associate him with helping me get through a terrible time in my life. As I've no doubt discussed here on the blog, I remember spending most of the first holiday season after B and I split, squirrelled away, hiding from the world, reading Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Since then I've read it several times (and doubtless will again), along with other favorites such as Kafka on the Shore and Norwegian Wood and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and 1Q84 and Sputnik Sweetheart and South of the Border, West of the Sun and A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance, etc. Obviously, I'm a huge fan. Truthfully, I haven't enjoyed some of his later works as much, although I don't know if that says as much about him as it does about me: we all change. I can remember the machinations I went through to track down a copy of 1Q84 when I lived in Abu Dhabi. It was 1Q84 where I think he became much more hit and miss, and at times almost lapsing into being a gentle self-parody of him (when will one of the characters descend into a well - or receive an unsettling call from a mysterious woman while he's cooking pasta, etc.). Nevertheless, I've enjoyed every one of them, and maybe I'm just judging his latest works unfairly. The City and Its Uncertain Walls reads as a revisiting of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and Kafka on the Shore (more, undeniably, the former than the latter), and at a certain point I felt that the "uncertain walls" were a commentary on his own perception of his works. I don't know if, in the end, it added up to anything, but I don't think that Murakami novels actually ever are designed to add up to anything, it's all about the journey. This journey simply feels less inspired.