Ila and Jerry and Wrigley have gone to the lake for the Fourth – Joe came in from LA and they picked him up at the airport – they’ll get to the cabin at about sunrise. Katy will drive up today after work. I’m headed back to Kansas City on Sunday. Iggy is being needy – his usual antics – I’ve never met a cat that needed that much lap time – he’s a dog, Katy said. She’s right.
Have a great Holiday! You too! They’re exchanging holiday greetings here at the coffee shop – most everyone heads out of town for the holidays – to the lake – their lake, a friend’s lake – the family lake – the lake place of a friend of a friend – a rental (Joe has a rental on the lake – it’s rented for the holiday – David is his caretaker – David lives there year round – he’s studying to be a radiologist).
And the process of ferrying everyone’s car from the Lake s to John the mechanic here in Homewood was too complicated for me – everyone was driving someone else’s car – Katy had her dad’s SUV, Brian had just gotten his back but the air-conditioner was not fixed, David dropped off his Volva on the way to a concert in Wisconsin – Jerry was to drive it back as David would take Katy’s car back up to the lake – it was actually much more complicated than that, but the details escape me – they escaped be at the time – the complexity of modern American life – it’s beyond me.
Yet there is little that is confessional about it – he [John O’Hara] does not linger over aspects of himself hoping that his self-absorption will make them seem exemplary. Rather he talks about himself because it is he who happens to be writing the poem – John Ashbery
Stand over there
Barbwire
It’s five o’clock
The sun has yet
To come up
The meadowlarks
Are anxious
To get to work
Beneath the seemingly literal and thus faithful translation there is concealed, rather, a translation of Greek experience into a different way of thinking. Roman thought takes over the Greek words without a corresponding, equally original experience of what they say, without the Greek world. The rootlessness of Western though begins with this translation – Martin Heidegger
It was in Harpers
Obama is the new
Hoover
McCain should have
Won
I thought so at the time
Then we could have been
Properly primed
A premature revolution
Is worse than none
At all
Obama is just too savvy
To be really radical
There is no way of telling people that they are walking around shining like the sun – Thomas Merton
My friend
You and I
We have
More in common
Then we admit
More than you have to
A Nigerian
And I and a German
We are American
And we must make
It do
He [Proust] generalized Illiers so that it should become universal, the paradise of innocent vision from which every human being is expelled at the end of his childhood. He shifted the known landscape of Illiers to give it the kaleidoscopic quality of a dream – the kind of dream in which, going a little past the furthest point reached in childhood walks on the outskirts of an inland industrial birthplace, we find ourselves in sight of Paris or the sea – George D Painter
Every sound belongs
To a thing
It’s one of the thingly
Things of that thing
Our senses collect
Thingly things
And our minds assign
Them names
They turn these thingly
Things into names
To the mind the name
Is now the thing
What is the poet for if not to scream / himself into a hernia of admiration for all / paradoxical integuments: the kiss, the / bomb, cathedrals and the Zeppelin anchored // to the hill of dreams? – John O’Hara
To be a demographic
That counts
There must first
Be expressed
Some interest in your
Buying power
For when a writer tries to startle, he is likely only to utter a cliché. He will only be profoundly original when he seeks painfully for a universal truth; and this will be most universal when it is most personal – George D Painter
Cowbell
Dinner bell
Ding dong
Liberty bell
Let freedom ring
A dead ringer
Ring on her finger
Ting-a-ling
Ring the bell
Send an alarm
Making it safe
Playing it safe
It’s in the safe
Better safe than
Sorry
Men and women are just like Tweedldee and Tweedledum, with what Jacques Derrida calls a ‘difference’. Not to be confused with what Nietzsche call ‘ressentiment’. – John Updike
From the Journals (#1 – 12/29/03 – Overland Park Kansas)
Now is the time to write – I have some time alone – I have skipped two days – not having made any entries.
Paul had taken Alice’s car (He got out of the Army - went to chef’s school - accumulated debt - now he’s unemployed and wants to become an environmental engineer; Alice – well, she died of cancer two years later – I returned from Spain in time; and the car its now here in Homewood being driven by Katy who is in her senior year at Northern – survived the campus massacre – has a new boyfriend).
Lorraine called – Alice was on good terms with her ex-mother-in-law – not as good as Larry Rivers was with his (no nudes of the ex-wife's mother), but they got along – she had taken his announcement in stride although with a sense of mother’s guilt when her son announced his new sexual preference – but when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s that was a different matter – now Carla is trying to find a nursing home for him that accepts Medicaid . She was looking for Paul. She had not heard from any of her three grandkids – “We don’t need this do we?” she said to me. She said she would try to call him on his cell phone and I didn’t hear back from her so I assumed that she had reached him.
I ground up some Costa Rican coffee beans in Gary’s used grinder (he had given it to his mother who had then sent it over with Carla with the meatballs. Now it was home - back with its original owner – my sister, Alice.
Its quite now. Only the hum of the refrigerator and an occasional tenet coming or going. It’s a good time to get little writing done. I am forcing myself to get into the practice of thinking with pen in hand which is why I started doing these journals.
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