PERHAPS MANY SOMETHINGS

Real cream. That’s right you read it. 100% full fat cream. In my coffee. Every morning now. Bite me. (I’m creamy.) I mention this because it tastes soooo good. And immediately adds some endorphins to counteract the cortisol of reality. It gives me a fighting chance for a better day.

I finished reading my 8^thbook of the year. It’s not a competition against anyone but myself and the mountains and boxes of books around. I keep waiting for the magic mindset that teaches me to let go and downsize my library. And, of course, I staid up too late to finish said book, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. Now, only one more Ferrante to read (in the Neapolitan quartet) and I will be liberated from this obsession. 

But I will go to bed earlier? I woke up after 10am. I don't like sleeping so late. I have a hard time getting into a productive mode when I wake that late, but I don't really sleep well until morning. Going to yoga for a 7:30 class that gets out at 9 does not help me to a deep sleep at a reasonable hour. 

The "quartet" nature of these Ferrante's put me in mind of the only other "quartet" I can remember reading, which was the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. I read them in my mid-20s, and my love interest of the time read them along with me. I did really love them but perhaps it is time to re-read? 

"This is not because Mr. Durrell has hit upon a felicitous method. It is because he is a genuine poet who seems to have survived morally and literally the disasters that have typically shattered his post-Joycean, post-Proustian generation. He is a "waste-land" intellectual who has come through. Once a disciple of Henry Miller, he has not only surpassed his gifted master, he has been able to cope with the disintegration that was his legacy to indicate a really new movement in literature. It is especially significant that he reports truthfully the sordidness of his material and makes something strong, healthy, wise, sad, amusing and beautiful of it. He has the eloquence of the twice-born."

— Gerald Sykes, It Happened in Alexandria, NY Times, 8/25/57

I like that "waste-land intellectual." (Of course, I haven't read The Waste Land. I need to find the audiobook.) I was emailing with one of my book group friends about books. ES is a fan of re-reading books. I have read a few (all of Jane Austen, Middlemarch, Swann's Way, Gone with the Wind, Dracula, Frankenstein, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Moby Dick, Jane Eyre, Gaudy Night come to mind) twice if not many times. I think Justine has to go back on that list.

Janet needs to be driven over to a lunch for one of her senior friends. I rather want to give Diane a gift as she is really nice to Janet and good at communicating with me. Then again, I don't buy or give things to the others who are also nice and I would not want to cause resentments. 

Wow. Just went to order a copy of Justine from the Los Angeles County Public Library system. There isn't a copy extant in the entire system. How fucked up is that? There is one copy of Mountolive (book three, I believe). That is just a wow. And disheartening.

Later, after another wasted day ...

I had to drop off my mom right next to one of my favorite thrift stores, so how could I avoid taking a peek? I didn't buy much, but it is a good time to be looking for used cds as that is one of the things folks are de-accessioning. 

Since I returned home after a library run, I had a pointless argument about Bernie Sanders on FB. I do not plan to vote for another older white man, particularly one who yells at me. It's time for a new breed, even if they are assholes and/or make mistakes. I like a lot of Bernie's ideas, but I don't want him as President. 

"And no one knew better than I did what it meant to make your own head masculine so that it would be accepted by the culture of men; I had done it, I was doing it."

— Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

I always have trouble explaining this concept. When a professor first pointed out the idea of dominant hegemony, I was furious and angry. He was pointing out the what was then the first Star Wars movie was nothing more than reinforcing those myths. By the end of the semester, I could see it. By the next year, I was about to get thrown out of the one class I needed to graduate when I pointed out what a piece of shit the film The Breakfast Club was (is). That professor required it as viewing as a fresh piece of film-making. I destroyed his point in a lecture and was almost expelled from class for disagreeing with him. By the end of that semester, he agreed with me. So thanks Robin Wood.

"Maybe there's something mistaken in this desire men have to instruct us: I was young at the time, and I didn't realize that in his wish to transform me was proof that he didn't like me as I was, he wanted me to be different, or, rather, he didn't just want a woman, he wanted the woman he imagined he himself would be if he were a woman. ... I was an opportunity for him to expand into the feminine, to take possession of it. I constituted proof that he knew how to be not only a man in the right way but also a woman."

— Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

LACQUER ARTIST

There is a nacreous gleam
in certain areas of the mind
where something must have been
at some time—
perhaps many somethings, 
judging by the pearlescence;
maybe the same weightless pleasures
or the same elusive lessons
repeated and repeated
with the patience
of the lacquer artist seated
at his task—eighty
coats per Japanese box.


FULL MEASURE

You will get your full measure.
But, as when asking fairies for favors,
there is a trick; it comes in a block.
And of course one block is not
like another. Some respond to water,
giving everything wet a little flavor.
Some succumb to heat, like butter.
Others give to steady pressure.
Others shatter at a tap. But
some resist; nothing in nature softens up
their bulk and no personal attack works.
People whose gift will not break
live by it all their lives; it shadows
every empty act they undertake.


— Kay Ryan, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, New York, Grove Press, 2010

I may have posted that last one before.