The Long Habit of Living

"an entrance wound in their relationship." A piece cut from original Long Habit of Living manuscript.

2012-02-12T11:12:00.000-08:00

[This piece is excerpted from the original version of the novel, before I had to condense it for the sake of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition, and eventually for the sake of trimming the novel period. Originally it occurred where Chapter XIV left off, what is now p. 285, and its time frame preceded Chapter XIX, where p. 365 is now.]

Owen was still in the doghouse, as far as Sarah was concerned, for scaring her that night she asked me to find him, the night he went to his old house in Woodside, Queens, without telling anyone. There was a slight reparation due Sarah, not in the form of material substance but in verbal and physical reassurances, especially the kind that reinforced their emotional commitment to each other. It wasn't a question of boundaries or equity; there was no blurting of "Let me make it up to you, honey." There was, nevertheless, an entrance wound in their relationship.

For three months he'd put aside what little cash he could sacrifice--since neither he nor Sarah earned more than thirty-thousand a year, and New York expenses in 1990 had climbed while salaries did not--in order to save up for the purchase of four newly published tomes on the Civil War. Folding that money into his palm, and holding it up for excise like the third eye of a Hindu god, he offered to take Sarah to Second Avenue and spend the money on her: It was to be dinner at one of the upscale restaurants on the Upper East Side. Sarah alleviated the sacrificial burden by letting him buy dinner, letting him pay for a taxi, and by encouraging him to pick up a quotation quiz book that he'd seen in a bookstore on Third Avenue. She'd wanted to make a point, but she didn't want it beaten into the ground.

He took her to the Manhattan Café. It was large enough to protect their intimacy, and small enough to be warm and shielded from the chance of a crowd. Over inch-and-a-half thick steaks cured in the hive glass and aged wood behind them, over cocktails and wine, Owen told Sarah jokes and read from the book of quotations. He gave her a new one every five minutes, and the quicker he'd made them up the cornier they sounded until she pleaded with him to stop, whereupon he began casually to feel her up under the table. He was determined that the evening should not be common. Owen described her beet red face and sparkling blue eyes as competition with a prize rose or as substitution for an aria by Monteverdi.

They finished eating by nine o'clock, when into the restaurant came Owen’s coworker, Douglas Tims, accompanied hand-in-hand by a woman who was not his wife. She was somebody else's wife. She was Andy McLean's wife, that's who she was. The surprise that came over Owen's face, since he was the first to see them, hit Sarah like a piece of lead. Owen saw events unfold because he preferred always to face the front of a restaurant rather than the rear, much like a mafia captain. He'd picked up this habit from way back in his childhood, having listened to selected nefarious conversations in his father's bar. "Keep your back to the kitchen and yourself facin' the door, son," advised an old puffy-faced regular at his father's pub. "That way, the dame you are hitched up with don't see ya with the dame y'aren't hitched up with. An' you can run out the back if she shows up."

Owen immediately put his head down and examined the floral print on his plate as the maitre d' brought the newcomers past his and Sarah's table to one that was ten feet away. Tims stopped.

Owen looked up.

"Douglas," he smiled. "What a surprise."

"Hi, Owen, Sarah," said the uncomfortable Douglas Tims.

"Joan? Nice to see you," continued Owen, looking to Andy's wife.

Everyone shook hands. Tims's face, as well as Joan's, was as white as the table cloth. Their color, originally pinkish and rosy, brought out by the cold, had vanished.

"How's Andy?" Sarah asked Joan of her husband.

Although I wouldn't have asked such a question, Sarah at once felt entitled to it. She had never considered herself a judge, but she did consider herself a good friend; and if to be a good friend to Andy McLean meant to ask his wife an embarrassing question, while she was on a date with her husband’s friend, then so be it. Tims had already crossed his own line.

"Oh, he's doing okay," Joan answered meekly.

"I never get to see him," said Sarah.

"He's been a little tired," said Joan.

Joan's long, dark hair, partially covering one of her eyes, made a failed attempt at facial poise. She couldn't hide who she was or what she was feeling, and demonstrated that weak link in her chain by glancing at the maitre d', who was still waiting for them to follow him. Tims nervously tugged at his trimmed goatee and gazed flatly into Owen's face.

"And you, Douglas? How're you doing?" Sarah pursued with the same sense of justice, but this time there was a little playfulness in her eyes.

"Working too hard, Sarah," he answered her.

"Sorry to hear that."

"So am I," said Tims, in pain. "Well, we're going to sit." He broke his stare, grabbed Joan's arm, and said: "Have a good night."

They moved away to their table, and Owen called for the check. He told me later that he and Sarah had never put their coats on in a restaurant so deftly and quickly as they did that night.

Outside in the cold Manhattan air, Sarah hugged herself to keep warm as Owen put his arm around her and directed their walk to the nearest subway station.

"It's nice to see our friends," remarked Sarah shivering. "It's nice to see them sleeping with each other."

“What do you expect?"

"They're crazy," she said.

"They're adults, Sarah. It's none of our business."

"Don't say that, Owen. Andy's your friend. Douglas works with you. What're you going to do?"

"Do? Me? Why me?"

"Because," she replied. "It's always you. What're you going to do?"

"Nothing," he answered.

"Doesn't it bother you that they're doing this?"

"Sure. Because I like Douglas. I like Joan. But he's made me take sides, now. I can't interfere."

"So you're not going to say anything?" she asked.

"Nothing," Owen repeated. "They tried to act as if nothing was wrong. And so did we."

Owen had ended up saying the same thirteen words to Andy McLean in a coffee shop a few blocks and a few minutes away on that very same evening. The initial collision had occurred less than a hundred feet from the restaurant's door. Andy had been trailing Joan from the apartment all the way from the west Village, where Douglas Tims lived. He intended to follow her and Tims to their final destination. Having decided to go home after he'd found out where the two had settled, he dipped into a delicatessen for a bottle of club soda and, reemerging, bumped into Owen and Sarah. Because of Andy's honesty, his good nature, his empathy, and his inability to keep hidden from a friend like Owen matters of great emotional strife, it didn't take Owen long to figure out what he and Sarah had got themselves mixed up in that night.

"Have you eaten yet?" Owen asked him.

"I'm not hungry," Andy replied.

"That's not what I asked," said Owen.

"How 'bout a cup of coffee?" Andy suggested.

Owen agreed and had pulled Andy along with him and Sarah into another coffee shop around the corner.

Sitting in a booth close to the front window, they'd soaked up coffee, tea, and chocolate cake. Behind the counter, football highlights, political talk, the business with

Iraq

, and the unstoppable commercials for Christmas had blared away on a television set.

"Sarah," Owen said. "Change seats with me."

"What for?" she replied.

"I can't take it," he said. "It's Madison Avenue talking. It's Christmas talking."

Both Sarah and Andy laughed uneasily as Sarah and Owen got up to change seats, so that Owen could sit with his back to the TV.

"I can't listen," he pleaded his case smiling. "They're trying to control my mind, you know; they're trying to control the minds of any great-grandchildren that I might end up having."

Having changed his seat, he began to watch the condensation build up on the glass panes of the windows and thus felt protected against the outside world. Those windows blurred the activity of a busy weeknight along Broadway. He was safe inside, no matter what was at issue, no matter what friend's wife was sleeping with what friend.

As he sipped his coffee, Andy asked Owen to tell Sarah what they'd talked about when they were out drinking together in Long Island City, that night prior to my going to meet Owen at the diner that weary morning. That episode had started to take on a significance which I would recognize only too late. Owen explained that, what Andy had alluded to on that far away evening, and what Owen had withheld from Sarah and me, was a suspicion that his wife was having an affair. Andy couldn't prove anything and he hadn't wanted to accuse Joan of anything because their relationship had already shown signs of disintegration, and he hadn't wanted to make things worse or act unjustly.

“It’s too expensive to keep giving up your friends,” Andy joked.

Their marriage hadn't yet gone beyond the point of no return, but it had become difficult in the sense that, honest discussions had had worse repercussions. They were discussions that ended up making it harder to live with each other instead of making it easier to mend the tear. He decided to follow her, simply, remaining at a distance, without judging her. Because, he said, he might have had something to do with the cause of her unhappiness and preferred to look at the reality of their marriage in terms of construction rather than destruction. Suspicions had been running their course until Kathy Tims, Douglas's wife, had shown up on Andy's doorstep demanding an explanation. (“Aha!” I had exclaimed later to Owen over the telephone.)

Andy had no explanation to give Kathy. She also told him to be sure to take care of his wife or she would be back. She had her hands full dealing with Tims and his depression and his low self-esteem bullshit and she didn't want another fight.

There wasn't much for Andy to do. Joan McLean had talked of staying with her sister, to give herself time to think. Apparently, she felt a lack of direction or one that was incommensurate with her wedding vows. It was almost a cliche. Andy had felt he was equally responsible for the mess because he kept putting off any confrontation for fear of what it might lead to. He couldn't argue with her. He simply deserted the emotional investment necessary for an angry and hurtful series of questions and answers. But he hadn't wanted to give it all up. He did, if one could phrase it this way, love her.

"Blew my mind," admitted Andy. "I'll give ya that much."

"How can you be so calm, Andy?" Sarah asked.

"I'm not calm," he replied.

"You look it.”

"This kinda thing happens all the time," he sighed.

"To you?"

"No."

"Then, who do you know has done this?" Sarah asked him.

"Personally? Nobody," he answered. "Heavy Catholics in my family."

"Then how can you say it happens all the time?"

"It does," insisted Andy. "Look at what's on TV. Look at what's in the papers under cause of death: 'fuckin' around.' They make movies about this shit. Look what they eat up in magazines and newspapers. Everybody's fuckin', Sarah, and usually they're fuckin' the wrong people. And it makes me kinda mad, y'know? It's... I don't know." He shook his head and stroked his beard. "Whole philosophies are formed from love," he smiled, treating the word with a mocking disdain. "Or the lack of it. I know. I teach philosophy."

"What're you and Joan going to do?" Owen asked him.

"I'm gonna try and understand what the fuck happened," Andy replied. He signaled the waitress for more water and coffee.

"Joan’s going to split?" Sarah asked.

"Probably."

"Do you want to come stay with us tonight?" she asked him. "Our place is warm. We've got a pull-out couch. Plenty of liquor. Good books. And best of all, we have Owen."

Andy smiled and placed his hand on her arm and they both knew at once that he wouldn't take her up on her offer.

The following morning Douglas Tims had called the office to report that he had a cold. He called in sick the day after as well.

"He's not returning my calls," Owen said to me.

"Is he depressed?" I asked.

"What do you think?” he said.

"I would be,” I said. “Then again, I wouldn’t put myself into this situation.”

“No,” Owen replied. “Not you.”

“No.”

“Never you,” he said.

And the burning truth behind the sarcasm and played out joke that I have been reluctant to take chances with my heart left me with yet another scab in the center of my chest, another trace of scar tissue to cover up breathless disappointment.

That night I hurried on home from work with an alien longing that reminded me of a little passage in War and Peace, when Pierre has just come from the Rostovs after seeing Prince Andrey, and his coachman asks him: "Now where, your excellency?" "Where? Home!" And the cold description of the dark night air, the starlit sky, and the longing for home filled me with anticipation. I wasn't worried about being mugged. I wasn’t pining to return to my family’s home in Connecticut. I was however worried that I would encounter someone I knew.

Tonsorial Parlor: A Short Story

2012-01-10T14:22:00.000-08:00

Tonsorial Parlor

Monday’s frittata was the highlight of Creation for Big Sal’s wife. She’d been working for years at perfecting the near Renaissance consanguinity of peppers, ham, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, and onions nestled in the golden-baked whipped eggs and milk. Big Sal--barber and half owner of Sal & Sal Hair Salon & Tonsorial Parlor--a redundant name because, when translated, it simply meant Sal and Sal Barbershop and Barbershop--had the sly confidence of knowing that The Other Sal would finally be impressed. Like Caravaggio with his paintings, Big Sal’s egg pie was his lead upon the scale, by which he measured the world of his sins and desires.

They were all outside, he, The Other Sal, and Rhonda the manicurist, as it was a summer morning, and they could sit comfortably in lawn chairs on the sidewalk. He placed the frittata on the milk crate, next to an open box of Dunkin’ Donuts and the usual three full mugs of coffee. It was a sign, a gesture of ritornando, of returning to the fold, as neither of the Sals had spoken to the other for the past week, not one single word. They spoke only to Rhonda, who relayed even the shortest breath of a message, even the slightest reply and grunt from one man to the next, or from one moment to the next. They might be angry, but they were not uncivilized gangsters.

“No salt,” said The Other Sal, having accepted a slice from Big Sal. “Not enough pepper, and the carrots are hard.”

“You don’t like anything my wife cooks,” said Big Sal.

“Then why do you bring her stuff to me?”

“Because she tells me to,” he shrugged, and brought the tips of his fingers together and upward. These had been the first words spoken between the men in seven days.

“You’re a grown man, Sal, an old grown man. Why don’t you tell her to go screw?”

“She’s my wife, Sal.”

“Doesn’t change the fact your wife cooks like shit,” said The Other Sal.

            “Maybe.”
            “For thirty years I’ve been telling you this.”
            “Thirty years you’ve been telling me a lot of things.”
            “What’s that supposed to mean?”
            “Here we go,” Rhonda muttered as she put down her fork and took up her steno pad and pen. She brushed her long dark hair back over her shoulders and perched sideways on her chair.
            “We should be rich by now,” Big Sal shrugged again.
            “We’re not rich? We have a business together, Sal. We have homes, wives, children, though mine are beautiful and yours are ugly. We have. . .”

“You always kick me.”

            “I never touch you, Sal.”
            “Hey. I’m talking in a meaning.”
            “Okay, so what do you mean?”
            “I’m telling you I don’t always feel good. And you kick me.”
            “And what do I say?”
            “You say, ‘Get laid.’ ‘Have something good to eat.’ ‘Go to a movie.’ ‘Buy land.’ ‘Do this, do that.’ ‘I don’t care,’ is what you say. Ever since you began to lose your hair, you’re like a big shot.”

“A barber who’s losing his hair has to...he has to give extra. He has to give an extra...”

            “...Crack. An extra crack at it,” interjected Rhonda.
            Sal and Sal both looked at her and paused. Then Big Sal spoke.
            “You’re a good barber, Sal, with or without hair.”
            “I know that, Sal, you taught me a lot.”
            Big Sal affectionately placed his index finger on the lower lid of his left eye as a silent gesture of thanks.
            “No, I mean it,” said The Other Sal.
            “You were always a good barber,” said Big Sal.
            “Yeah, but I think I was a better man…back then….”
            “Why, ‘cause you had hair?”
            “You can say that. You have a full thick head of hair to match your thick brain, and your thick face and your thick lips to match your full thick body.”
            “You’re saying I’m fat?”
            “I’m always saying you’re fat.”
            “At least I don’t sleep with the coloreds.”
            “Oh. That’s right.”
            A pestering silence crept among their feet like an unwanted cat. Who would be the first to knock it away with his foot?
            “When’s Bruno Smokes coming?” Big Sal asked.
            “Said he’d be here by eleven.”
            “It’s almost eleven now.”
            “Alright, alright, but it’s not eleven, is it?”
            “Almost.”
            “He probably has to find parking.”
            “You make excuses for him all the time.”
            “You love him as much as I do,” smiled The Other Sal.
            “Naturally. He brings us the lobsters.”
            “And the shrimp.”
            “And the fish.”
            “And he cooks, too,” continued The Other Sal. “His wife, I don’t know if she cooks, ‘cause he never talks about it. But he cooks good.”

“That’s why we love him.”

            “That’s right.”
            “What d’you think?” Big Sal asked Rhonda.
            “He’s probably right,” she replied cautiously, and then looked at The Other Sal: “But you’re still missing the point of his feelings.”
            “What feelings?”
            “How you kick him,” she exhaled. “In a symbolic way.”
            The two Sals looked at each other and then each cut another piece from the frittata.
            “Oooh, ow,” Rhonda whispered loudly and quickly opened and closed her legs at the knees, like an accordion.
            “What? Rhonda. You have to use the bathroom?”
            “No.”
            “What’s wrong?”
            “I can’t say.”
            “Your pussy itches?” said The Other Sal.
            “Mmm bah,” gasped Big Sal. He held his plate extended away from him, and turned to gaze across the street.
            “You didn’t wash?” asked The Other Sal, smiling.
            “Hey, I’m clean. You know I’m clean. I’m like dessert, I’m so clean. And you of all people, talking to me that way.”
            “I’m concerned.”
            “Doesn’t mean a thing when you accuse me. How you say it disrespects me.”
            “You said you liked that.”
            “I did. I do. Excuse me,” she stood up. “But Mr. DiMattia is here.”
            Mr. DiMattia, 60ish, with the eager eyes of a happy dog, slicked-back curly gray hair, paunchy, was tie-less in a gray suit. Sal and Sal greeted him with a welcome reserved for the diseased. Rhonda, ever the shop steward, took his elbow and led him inside.
            “You hurt her feelings.”
            “No, I didn’t.”
            “You said she—“
            “Basta!”
            While Sal and Sal remained outside, Mr. DiMattia sat contentedly, his hands soaking in a green soapy solution. On the counter behind him and to the right, the small espresso machine purred in a sleepy attendance upon the next demitasse to be taken. It exhorted hisses with self-reverence as if to say: “I am not just a coffee machine in a barbershop. I am culture.” Rhonda sat down before him, her steno pad tucked inside her arm pit. She clasped her knees together, wagging again like an accordion, and gasped “Oooh” and “Ow.”
            “Something wrong?” asked Mr. DiMattia.
            “No, just trying to get comfortable. I think it might be the heat.”
            “Maybe you need some cream.”
            “Don’t be a pig. Just soak.”
            “You know, you make my hands look so young, I almost want to cry. It reminds me of my childhood.”
            “Shhh. I have to listen to what they’re saying. I have to take note of everything I can.”
            “Why?”
            “Because they are writing their autobiography.”
            “Who?”
            “Sal and Sal.”
            “Sal and Sal? Them?”
            “Yes.”
            “What’s it going to be called?”
            “Sal and Sal: An Autobiography.”
            “Ooh, that’s good. I like that,” he said.
            She grabbed her steno pad and wrote: “For two men who have known each other since Confirmation, they never cease to argue about the obvious.”   She placed her pad down on her lap as the two barbers walked in. The Other Sal stepped inside first and held the screen door for Big Sal, who slowed to a hover.
            “And why don’t we have coke?” asked Big Sal, picking up a stray terrycloth rag.
            Rhonda massaged her customer’s fingers and watched Sal and Sal attentively. She noticed the near bursting stomach button from Big Sal’s white shirt and then, like a river, her eyes drifted to the proud erections of dark hair that reached out from the nape of The Other Sal’s neck. Those hairs gave nest to his silver cornicello pendant, his “little horn” guarding that open space of his embroidered gray camp shirt.
            “Soda?” The Other Sal looked up from the barber chair in which he’d found the objects of his search: his cigarettes and lighter. He followed Big Sal back outside to their respective lawn chairs. The morning was beginning to feel like a headache.
            “No, coke,” repeated Big Sal. “Coke! Co-ca-yeen!”
            “It’s still morning, Sal.”
            “If we had some coke, we wouldn’t need coffee and donuts.”
            “Since when do you care?”
            “I’m gaining too much weight,” confessed Big Sal.
            “It’s not the donuts.”
            “Hm,” grunted Big Sal. He stared across the street to the adult movie theater, and listened as the elevated Number 7 train squeaked and rumbled into the 74^th Street station.
            “But he’s got a good wife, though,” said Big Sal, still looking away.
            “Who? Mr. DiMattia?” asked The Other Sal, helping himself to yet a third slice of the frittata that he did not like.
            “Bruno Smokes.”
            “Oh, yeah, I suppose, a good woman, yes, that’s what he tells us.”
            “You don’t believe him?”
            “I don’t think he knows himself how good a woman he has.”
            “Where’d we go wrong?” sighed Big Sal.
            “With what?”
            “With our wives.”
            “We were impatient.”
            “I think we still are.”
            “Speak for yourself.”
            “I speak for both of us.”
            “Why, because I’m losing my hair? I don’t have a voice? My nose not good enough?”
            “Lost your hair.”
            “Lost my hair.”
            “Bruno Smokes thinks you’re the better barber,” quipped Big Sal.
            “Yeah, but you treat him better than I do,” said The Other Sal. “You kiss his ass.”
            “I do what I do. It’s respect.”
            “It’s gratitude.”
            “For the lobsters.”
            “Don’t show him any more rings this time. Keep the jewelry in the drawer.”
            “I have to get rid of them. They’re hot, Sal.”
            “Yeah, but not to Bruno. And besides, . . .I know they’re hot, è vero, but who said you had to buy them? Besides, his wife will bust his balls about it when he comes home wearing another pinky ring.”
            “So, he buys her something, too.”
            “And no more talk about your daughter’s condo.”
            “What am I supposed to do with that fucking thing?”
            “You tell your daughter to take care of it herself. It’s hers.”
            “She has no real estate head. No business head.”
            “Mmf. No head at all, if you ask me.”
          “Keep that to yourself.”
            “It’d be different if she kept it to herself, Sal.”
            “Bruno Smokes is here.”
            “Finally.”
            Although a generation behind them, Bruno “Smokes” Orsso was one of their oldest and most trusted friends. Bruno got his name from stealing cartons of cigarettes as a kid and then smoking them religiously until he had no voice left. It was Big Sal who’d one day christened him with the name Smokes, because the smell of nicotine and sulfur had hung about Smokes Orsso like a dusty velvet curtain. The young man’s teeth-grinding odor was more pronounced than his abilities to lie, to curse, to inspire, to predict, and to cheat; and that was saying something, because Smokes was admired for all of those traits. However, after landing a job at the Fulton Fish Market, the sound of his name didn’t fit with the culture of the fish handlers and the loaders and the cutters, not to mention the men who stood around and authoritatively smoked their cigarettes. Smokes Orsso sounded like the name of a black jazz musician from New Orleans. He couldn’t have that, even if he had soul. He became Bruno Smokes, and left out the “Orsso” for the sake of the Market.
            “This street not ugly enough without you two mopes sitting outside? Somebody call the sanitation department. Man, this block is fucking depressing.”
            “Somebody call a priest for your filthy mouth,” Big Sal said as he hugged Bruno Smokes. The Other Sal hugged and kissed Bruno on the cheek and said “Come stai?”
            “These are for you,” said Bruno, handing him a burlap sack.
            “Thanks, where’s Sal’s bag?” the man asked, grabbing Bruno’s crotch and smiling through the smoke of his cigarette.
            “Don’t push it old man,” said Bruno Smokes.
            “Let’s go inside,” said The Other Sal, holding the door open. “You want a hair cut?”
            “It was on my mind, yes,” said Bruno as he stepped into the shop and smiled and nodded at Rhonda. Big Sal took the sack of seafood from The Other Sal and walked across the room to deposit it into a small refrigerator.
            “I got a coupla girls downstairs,” continued The Other Sal. “Friends of…”
            “I know who they are.”
            “Nice.”
            “Not really...Hair and nails, please,” said Bruno as he plopped onto the barber chair while The Other Sal draped a deep red seersucker cloth across his great chest.
            “Bruno! I don’t like the fish last time,” said Big Sal from across the room. He was preparing a demitasse of espresso for Bruno. “The grouper.”
            “What was wrong with it?”
            “No taste.”
            “No taste because it wasn’t any good? Or no taste because you don’t know what you’re doing?”
            “I can cook, Bruno, I can cook.”
            “You cook like an old blind woman.”
            “I told him that,” laughed The Other Sal. “I tell him that all the time.”
            “He tells me because he can’t cook himself,” said Big Sal, sauntering up to the chair. He handed Bruno his espresso and began to comb out his hair.
            “Stop.” The Other Sal looked at Bruno.   “How’s your wife?” he asked.
            “How do I know?”
            “Not speaking?” The Other Sal settled into the empty barber’s chair beside them. He lit up two cigarettes and handed one to Bruno. “Don’t you talk?” The Other Sal wore a smile that reeked of sedition, it stood for the flimsy mechanics of broken machinery and wine-soaked labor, from which he came out of Salerno. It was that new Italian smile that had made him famous in the neighborhood, especially among the women.
            “Who’s got the time?” answered Bruno Smokes. “I gotta work. I gotta bring lobsters to you two mooks. I gotta get cigarettes. I got business to take care of. So, I see her on the weekend. We catch up. You know, they called me for jury duty. What a fucking joke.”
            Big Sal stopped snipping at Bruno’s hair and opened a towel cabinet behind the chair. He reached in under the towels and removed a felt-lined handkerchief box displaying sixteen rings, three necklaces, and two watches. Like a waiter with the wine list, he formally presented it to Bruno Smokes. Bruno examined the presentation with controlled delight. They were all gold, several had precious stones embedded in them, and the necklaces had single pearls.
            “Where’d you get these?”
            “Jimmy Eyes.”
            “You know Jimmy?”
            “Hmm. Yeah.”
            Jimmy Eyes, whose real name was Polish and very difficult to pronounce, had an eye ball condition called cranial nerve palsy; that is, each eye ball faced a different direction, which gave Jimmy a freaky look that none of his friends could bear, except Bruno Smokes, who was his chum from high school. Jimmy could always be depended upon to make a room full of men feel uncomfortable, gassy, and self-conscious.
            The Other Sal stood up and out of his barber chair and, from another towel cabinet, extracted a bottle of Macallan scotch whiskey and three shot glasses. He poured full splashes into the glasses and brought them around to Bruno and Big Sal. With imperfect unison, they raised their glasses, grunted, and drank.
            “Bruno, what d’you think?” asked Big Sal.
            “What? About the rings?”
            “No, what about the whiskey?”
            “It’s not whiskey. It’s scotch,” said The Other Sal. “It’s forty years old.”
            As Bruno was about to grab for the felt rack of rings, and as his fingers barely touched upon one that he wanted, Big Sal swung the tray aside and silently replaced it into the towel cabinet. He stooped low to open another cabinet and, with pride, he brought out three more bottles of aged scotch.
            “Whoa, where’d you get those?” Bruno Smokes smiled.
            “You gotta know?”
            “No, I don’t. What do you have? Bell’s? Laphroaig? How much?”
            “He wants to tell you about them first,” said The Other Sal.
            “Okay.”
            “If only people would let me talk for myself,” said the bruised Big Sal. “I only want what’s best for me. Make an offer.”
            “Could I get one of them?” asked Mr. DiMattia from across the room.
            Big Sal and Bruno Smokes turned to look at him. They stared as if he’d interrupted a baptism with a belch. Then Big Sal exhaled and resumed his concentration on Bruno’s possible offer. The Other Sal doused his cigarette and languidly stuck his scissors into his hand, one loop slipped around his ring-finger and the comb placed smoothly between his index finger, middle finger, and thumb. He picked up on Bruno’s hair where Big Sal left off.
            “Okay. I got ‘em from Jimmy Eyes.”
            “Jimmy Eyes again?”
            “Bruno, don’t you worry. I’ll take thirty for each.”
            As soon as The Other Sal stopped cutting and combing, and Big Sal had skirted around to the other side of the barber chair, Bruno Smokes knew something else would now be made available, something else would now be revealed. He looked at The Other Sal to confirm that Big Sal had one more pitch to go.
            “I’ll give you a hundred for all three,” said Mr. DiMattia tenuously.
            “You like video games, Bruno?” Big Sal smiled, ignored Mr. DiMattia, and ran another thick comb through Bruno’s hair.
            “Do you mean do I want to have a relationship with them?”
            “No, no, no, no, you’re crazy, Bruno. I mean I got thirty-two Goldstar Z-Boxes. I bought ‘em for fifty a piece.”
            “And?”
            “I got to move ‘em before Tuesday.”
            “Why? What’s Tuesday? Jimmy Eyes coming back again with more crap?”
            “The pigs are coming in,” said The Other Sal.
            “What do you mean?”
            “Pigs, Bruno, pigs. Bacon, ham, ribs. Baby pigs, Bruno, coming in on a ship.”
            “Where do they come from?” asked Bruno.
            “North Carolina,” said The Other Sal.
            “North Carolina is a beautiful state,” said Big Sal.
            “How do you know? You ever been there?” asked Bruno.
            “No.”
            “Then how do you know?”
            “It’s in my head. I must have read about it somewhere.”
            Bruno Smokes looked at The Other Sal.
            “Great, now he’s Encyclopedia Brown.”
            Big Sal smiled broadly and nodded his head, having no clue who Encyclopedia Brown was or could possibly be.
            “I’ll give you eighty bucks each for the Z-Boxes.”
            “How about a hundred?”
            “Eighty-five.”
            ‘Ninety-five.”
            “Ninety.”
            “Nope.”
            “You’re a ball buster, Sal.”
            “Hey, Sal and me, we’re entrepreneurs, Bruno.”
            “I thought you were barbers.”
            “We are, of course. But Sal says he knows somebody and so we make the deal.”
            “Who does Sal know?” said Bruno Smokes.
            The Other Sal looked up. Big Sal tapped his index finger to his thumb twice.
            “Okay,” agreed Bruno Smokes. “Ninety-five. And then I want some of the Pig.”
            “Deal.”
            “I also want the ring on the left and the bracelet on the right.”
            “How can I afford that, Bruno?”
            “How can you afford my lobsters, you cheap guinea bastard?”
            Their collective laughter abruptly halted when the screen door opened and in walked Mr. Chen from the dry cleaners next door. He was short, balding, wore wire-rim glasses, and his mouth was always open and gave his face the look of constant worry. He might be in the midst of telling a funny and bawdy joke, yet his jowls and raised eyebrows resembled the anxiety and timidity of a Chihuahua too close to the oven. He walked silently up to The Other Sal and handed him a folded five-dollar bill intertwined with a piece of white scratch paper. Sal quickly pocketed it. Mr. Chen then turned to Big Sal, nodded, and walked out.

Rhonda--who had been watching the men and intermittently writing in her steno pad, sprayed Mr. DiMattia’s fingernails with a cool finisher--took up the pad and wrote: “They have pride of place. Yet there is something between them that no one understands.”

What she couldn’t explain was why the two Sals had not been speaking to each other for seven days. No one besides the two Sals knew really. The two men enjoyed a common center of mass: it was actually the space between their barber chairs. They orbited the chairs and each other like binary stars, like a carefully choreographed dance. Big Sal cut his customer’s hair starting from the left, The Other Sal started from the right. They never intersected. The space, however, did not expand; it was constant; and it has always been the ground over which the two men fought. It was their disputed territory. It was their Kashmir. And like the Kashmir, once intersected, once bumped, there is the skirmish. And seven days ago, they bumped.

When it happened, Big Sal looked accusingly at The Other Sal--his lips tight and ugly. Then The Other Sal returned the accusing look, holding his comb and scissors aloft. But it was not the bump that caused the silence, it was the accusatory Look, the scowl, and the wrinkled brow. The Look was the mortar blast.

            Rhonda put the steno pad down and gave Mr. DiMattia’s hands the once-over.
            “You’re done, Mr. D.,” she said.
            “I tell you, Bruno,” said Big Sal as he trimmed Bruno’s nose hairs. “I don’t know how I lasted this long.”
            “You lasted this long because you have pride of place,” said The Other Sal, avoiding Rhonda’s eyes. “You know where you are, Sal.”
            “Yeah, because I’m just like you,” replied Big Sal. “Not like Bruno Smokes, here. You, Bruno, you’re like a son to me.”
            “Hey, Sal, I’m too young, I’m too good looking to be your son.”
            “Oh. How come I feel so much older?”
            “’Cause you’d rather be angry than anything else.”
            “It’s a choice, Bruno.”
            “Easy choice for you, Sal. You do it with your hand around your prick and your mouth over a bottle of Crown Royal. Who’re you kidding?”
            “You hurt me,” said Big Sal.
            “How can I hurt you? I’m your friend.”
            “No, really, I think all this time that we’re friends, you’ve been lying to me.”
            “You’re an idiot.”
            “I don’t think so.”
            “I’ve been getting my hair cut by you and Sal since I was 17 years old. I tell all my friends to come to you. I tell my family to come to you. I even sent my mother to you.”
            “She did come here once,” said Big Sal.
            “Beautiful woman,” said The Other Sal.
            “She’s seventy-three,” expelled Bruno Smokes.
            “Still.”
            “Still. What else is there?” said Big Sal, staring out the front door.
            “What does that mean?” Bruno Smokes asked. “Do you understand what the fuck he’s talking about?”
            “No, but I trust him,” said The Other Sal. “You see, Bruno, I don’t try to change him, all these years. He is who he is. He looks at people, he sees their heads and--”
            “I see more than their heads,” said Big Sal.
            “Oh yeah? What d’you see? Their livers?”
            “I see everything. You’re too small to understand. You’re mind is too small.”
            The grinding teeth and flaring nostrils were once again changing the tone of the shop. Exasperation had poured out before they knew it.
            “They’re getting obstreperous with each other,” Rhonda said through gritted teeth, as she helped Mr. DiMattia to stand. He walked over to The Other Sal’s empty chair and sat down.
            “Jesus. Jesus Christ, I cut hair next to this guy and he tells me I’m small minded,” laughed The Other Sal.
            “Bruno, shoot me with morfina. I need something.”
            “I need a drink,” said Bruno Smokes.
            “I need a lay.”
            “You know Sal,” began Mr. DiMattia. “It is the third Friday of the month.”
            “And do you want to go downstairs?” The Other Sal asked him, as he gently combed Mr. DiMattia’s curly gray hair.
            “Well, ....” Mr. DiMattia said, his palms up in a gesture of culpability.
            “Well, if you’re going downstairs I want to see the Z-Boxes,” Bruno said.
            With the seersucker cape still wrapped around him, Bruno joined Sal and Sal, and Mr. DiMattia, as they negotiated the space between the chairs, put down their combs and scissors, and walked past Rhonda, who sat sipping her coffee, beneath the framed portrait of President Kennedy.
            “Thank God my hands are clean,” mumbled Mr. DiMattia as they passed the espresso machine, which rested beneath a framed photo of Pope John the 23^rd.
            “What's this old man talking about?” Bruno Smokes turned to Big Sal, as he bumped into a moveable wash basin and then a canvas hamper for dirty towels.
            “It’s because of the past, Bruno,” The Other Sal laughed as he paused by a picture of Perry Como. “Women are slaves at the hands of men.”
            “But my hands are clean,” mused Mr. DiMattia, lightly fingering the deep green leaves of three potted philodendron plants.
            “My mother used to work like a slave,” pronounced Big Sal.
            “Here we go,” said The Other Sal, pausing beside their faux-Tiffany lamp, from which was suspended a fist-sized cornicello, its red chili pepper shape topped by a golden tassel.
            “È vero?!”
            “No, Sal. No one was a slave in Salerno,” said The Other Sal.
            “I felt like I was.”
            “Until you met me.”
            “Maybe.”
            “Until we moved to New York.”
            “Maybe.”
            The sound of the men’s shuffle, their feet burning with an expectancy that desire makes of a desert, made their journey to the wooden door in the corner of the shop as deep and as long as Death Valley itself.
            “Sal, this is the only place on earth for us,” The Other Sal said as he opened the door and descended the stairs. “We can’t go nowhere else. We are here. We are friends since the Bishop slaps us on our face and says go in peace you soldier of God. We are our own slaves, Sal.”
            Big Sal paused on a step, looking backward from Bruno Smokes to The Other Sal. Bruno nudged Big Sal to keep going.
            In the basement, walls paneled, floor carpeted, with furnishings that made one feel at home--except for the presence of two prostitutes, there were two piles of stacked boxes that took up nearly a third of the room.
            “Plasma TVs?” exclaimed Bruno Smokes. “You didn’t tell me about PLASMA TVs!”
            Mr. DiMattia walked over to the younger of the two women. She greeted him kissing him once on both cheeks.
            “I can’t do my business with all of you here,” she smiled, standing in front of a sheet hung from a clothesline.
            “That’s where we’re going to hang the pigs,” said Big Sal, pointing to the clothesline.
            “Right,” said Bruno. He turned with a fluidity and breeze that lifted his red seersucker cape, and began the return upstairs. Like an emperor followed by his train, Big Sal and The Other Sal fell into line and climbed the stairs as well.
            “I didn’t think the girl would mind,” said Big Sal naively.
            “You see, that’s the way you are,” said The Other Sal. “You never understand. You’re like the carrots in the frittata. They didn’t belong there ‘cause sweet carrots make a conflict with the savory of the frittata. Don’t you know that? And you thought I was trying to kick you. You’ll never understand.”
            “I’ll never understand.”
            Rhonda, leaning against the wall in the shadows behind one of the stacks of plasma TVs, her steno book in hand, wrote down every word. She watched the girl lead the old man behind the sheet, and then she continued writing:
            “Sal and Sal degrade themselves daily. They decry themselves,” she scribbled furiously, “believing themselves martyrs, and go on, each day, cutting hair….”
            She stopped.
            “How I love them both,” she whispered to the empty stairs.

(C) Copyright 2012 by Mark Zipoli

I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.

2012-01-09T11:15:00.000-08:00

"I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it." So begins Pat Barker's novel, Regeneration, with a letter from Siegfried Sassoon to the "Times" of London, July 1917. A lot of parallels in Barker's novel of World War I to what's been going on in the U.S. and the world since before September 11. We could stand to read books from and about WW I. Might change our aggressive responses to anything and everything not American.

Here are the fiction books I read during 2011.

The new year started with Thomas McGuane's Nobody's Angel (very funny) and James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime. Says Jesse Kornbluth of James Salter: "He’s considered a “writer’s writer” --- that is, too good for the masses to appreciate. There are worse things to be called. Still, to be a "writer's writer" for 35 years...." These books are very different from each other. Both are extremes in the same world. I liked them. I recommend them.

In February it was more of McGuane, Driving on the Rim, and a short one from the Master, Henry James' Turn of the Screw. I'm liking McGuane more each time I read him.

In March I read a good historical novel called Conspirata by Robert Harris, who gave us Pompeii, which I read in 2010, and liked very much. Conspirata is the story of the plot to assassinate Julius Caesar. You know me and gladiators, Romans, and aquaducts, just can't get enough. Also read Colum McCann's Zoli, a very moving novel of a gypsy woman and her clan. I got lost in the time shifts, but the critics seemed to like it a lot.

Also read Jim Harrison's The English Major. I tell you, I've read a lot of Harrison; and I wish my blog could be a brilliant and luminous billboard for the works and life of Jim Harrison. I love his books. His life-view is widesweeping, or widestretching or something wide, big, sprawling like Montana and Nebraska and Arizona. He loves food and wine, and so do I. He loves literature, and so do I. I wish I started reading him years ago, but there's just so much a person can do. I wish Harrison could get a postage stamp. I wish more people would read him, especially people in power, in academia, or in hotels (instead of watching ESPN or "Two & a Half Men" and drinking expensive cocktails in the bar).

If March goes in like a lion and out like a lion, that's what it was like to read Henning Mankell's The Man From Beijing (a murder mystery of worldwide stature, brilliant, historical, well-written) and The Possibility of an Island from my man Michel Houelbecq. Houelbecq has become my alter ego, without him knowing of course, and I've read The Elementary Particles and Platform, both of which have offended readers and critics, and I'm so glad. I've got my hands on his new book, The Map and the Territory, and can't wait to start it.

French novelist Michel Houelbecq

In June I read Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark and Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang. Laughter in the Dark, I must admit, is not one of Nabokov's better books. It contains his penchant for older man younger woman, very young woman, and I'm still to this day trying to figure out the "why" of the book.

Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang is a great book. It is a book of movement, hilarity, drunkenness, saboutage, sex, the hot hot sun of the southwest, and I tell you, while I scratched my imaginary five o'clock shadow and squinted as I took a pull on the sixth beer I wasn't drinking, I loved every minute of it.

In July I read James Jones' Some Came Running, which I got at the Santa Monica Library's bookstore for $2.00. I've been wanting to read it for a long time, and I was not disappointed, except for the irritation factor which Jones employs by not using apostrophes when he writes contractions, and then there's this style he likes of stating a noun in a sentence, and then in the same or next sentence using that noun's adverbial form, and then adverbially again, and again. Mr. Jones it appears was not in the habit of listening to his editors. (Sorry, that's just me being an effete intellectual snob.) I liked the book and hope it continues to draw readers.

Also in July I read The Easter Parade by Richard Yates. In August I read Pat Barker's World War I novel Regeneration, the first in the trilogy, with appearances by Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Wilfred Owen. I really enjoyed this book and am looking forward to the next two.

Also in August I finally finished Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk, the first in the Cairo trilogy series. It was a very long book, but it was also very good. Mahfouz's expose of the male-dominant, male-hypocritical dominant culture of WW I Egypt, its occupation by the Allies, its Ottoman Empire backwardness, and its social customs that suppress women to the point of a scrap metal crusher can sometimes make for frustrating reading; but it is important to read him, I feel, it is very important. Mahfouz, winner of the Nobel Prize, was (toward the end of his life) shot by a would-be assassin's bullet, an Islamic fanatic who didn't like the author's parodies, to say it mildly. But he continued. Individuals with a voice for individual freedom and the freedom of others often get in the way of the violent swing of the moralist's hammer. The characters in Palace Walk are very likeable, and the misfortune of living in an occupied country and being hamstrung by religious fundamentalism causes one [the reader] compassion, not condescension. Christopher Dickey of Newsweek writes:

"Palace Walk, first published in 1956, is the best of Mahfouz's work. He drew heavily on autobiography (like the character Kamal, he was the youngest son in a large merchant clan). He writes about family, and to understand the Egyptian family is to understand, more clearly than any political treatise can explain, the soul of the country."

Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz

Also read Anne Enright's The Gathering and Daniel Woodrell's Tomato Red. Lots of anger and yelling in Enright's book, especially at a time of death; lots of anger and blame and melodramatic stuff that you need more than tea to swallow down as you read it. Tomato Red however is a horse of a different color. It's a very strange book, set in Ozark country, told in powerful prose with the strange leaking bizarreness of smaller than small-town life. I'll read more Woodrell for sure. Then came Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot. This was more interesting (for its biographical sketchs of French novelist and national hero Gustav Flaubert and his contemporaries) than it was meaningful reading (as a novel). I haven't given up on Barnes, so don't worry. But Flaubert's Parrot I feel was written for the academic literati, and therefore not as clever and brilliant as everyone thinks. But that's just me being an effete intellectual snob.

Vlad Dracul, the Impaler, Count Dracula

September found me reading Muriel Spark's The Only Problem, Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, Long Last Happy by Barry Hannah, and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland. Let's just say that I liked all three of these books. Kostova's novel about the search for Vlad the Impaler remains fairly true to legend and revealed an immense amount of scholarship mixed with flashbacks and country-hopping.

The Only Problem is unusual, "an extremely sophisticated account of the perils that surround our unsuspecting lives in the world today and a disputation on the subject of the Book of Job, which she calls 'the pivotal book of the Bible.'" [Anita Brookner, The New York Times]

Joseph O'Neill

I liked Netherland more than I expected; lots of Brooklyn, shady immigrants, post-September 11 anxiety, and a troubled marriage. I'm not doing the author justice (but I recommend it highly) Netherland is the "story of a family. The narrator, Hans van den Broek, is a Dutch-born equities analyst who lives in a TriBeCa loft with his British-born wife, Rachel, and their son. When 9/11 forces them to flee uptown, they end up living...in the shabby-glamorous Chelsea Hotel, and it is there that their marriage slowly cracks apart. The book’s second story line is about the solace Hans finds in the vibrant subculture of cricket in New York, where he is among the few white men to be found on the hundreds of largely West Indian teams in the city, teams that fan out, in the hazy summertime, across scrabby, lesser-known public parks." [Dwight Garner, The New York Times]

One of the most enjoyable and entertaining and empowering writers I read this year was the late Barry Hannah. I kept quoting passages from these stories to my friends, laughing out loud while I did so; I could not get over how good this book is. (Sorry about the tense variations within one sentence.) I can unconditionally say that, except for my friend Joe Savino, and perhaps the late Larry Brown, Barry Hannah's work was singular in its influence upon my short story writing efforts in 2011. I haven't read a lot of Hannah's books, just a novel Yonder Stands Your Orphan and the collection of selected short stories featured at left, Long, Last, Happy, but in 2012 I'm going to.

October was a busy month for reading, probably because like August and September, the six furlough days I had to take from work gave me down time and escape time. Only negative there is escaping into literature isn't going to pay the bills. Nevertheless, here's to October: The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley; The Great Leader by Jim Harrison; On Beauty by Zadie Smith; and A Man of Parts by David Lodge.

Author photos: James Crumley, David Lodge, H.G. Wells

The Last Good Kiss is not the kind of book I would have picked up in years gone by, unless it came highly recommended by someone I know. But I tell you, this book is hilarious. You've got the pervading presence of an alcoholic bulldog among a cast of whacked out other characters while our protagonist is trying to solve a mystery and trying to do so while intensely inebriated. I loved this book. A Man of Parts, another book by one of my favorite authors, David Lodge, this time about H.G. Wells. Lodge also gave us Author Author about the Master, Henry James, so you can bet your bottom dollar he's aces in my book, and has been for many many years. I have posted on the wall above my big chair, in which I read, some codes of narrative coherence that Lodge feels one should, as a writer, adhere to. A Man of Parts gives one insight into H.G. Wells that quite frankly astounded me. And I'm not going to share them here either, you have to read the book. Zadie Smith's On Beauty is a very good book; well-written, intelligent; her prose places the cheek of another human face close to your own skin to prove that we are not all that different. Feel the warmth.
The Great Leader by my hero Jim Harrison is subtitled a faux mystery. But it wasn't so; he followed the structure of a good mystery and entertained us (as he usually does) with his love of food and poetry and drink, and his love of the exquisite bottoms of young women; so many sexual meanderings to the point of well, damn, the book had to come to an end someplace. Unfortunately.

November gave me Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna; Pete Dexter's Paris Trout; Sam Lipsyte's The Ask; and Jim Harrison's Warlock. This was some month, aside from Thanksgiving.

My friend Barbara Mock Autry and I, one fine spring evening in San Diego, shortly before she and her family moved East, were talking books and I brought up Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, which she read and loved; "...then you have to read The Lacuna. You will love it, Mark," she said, "I know you will." And I did.

Artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera

The sections with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera were very entertaining, I enjoyed quoting them to my friends. The historical points of reference concerning the Mexican communist party movement, the sanctuary given to Leon Trotsky by the Riveras, even though Trotsky's on Stalin's hit list, and the hypocrisy of American govenment and culture during the HUAC period, together with a young man's blossoming writing career based on his life with Frida and her bunch, all made for a wonderful book. And I haven't even explained the half of it.

Barbara Kingsolver

I am a great fan of Barbara Kingsolver, to be sure.

Paris Trout. What can I say about the meanest sonofabitch I've come across in a long time, not since Larry Brown's character of the father in Joe. Paris Trout is a true believer; he's also a despicable human being. This is a great book. At times it was a nightmare.

"Things look different ways when they ain't clear," Trout said. "I don't forgive debts," he said. "I pay my obligations, and I am paid in return. ...you forgive one debt, ain't none of them going to pay you ever."

The nastiness of Paris Trout sent me through the roof, especially when he declares, "I don't have a cruel heart." Well, my friends, read the book.

I also read The Ask by Sam Lipsyte, which had some moments, I must admit. And then Warlock by Jim Harrison, about an unemployed foundation executive whose life becomes unhinged. I enjoyed this book very much. It's Jim Harrison.

In December it was McEwan's Black Dogs. This is a strange book, and McEwan often makes me uncomfortable, which is the pleasure I get from reading him. "The story revolves around a dramatic and terrifying event which changed the whole life of the narrator's mother-in-law, affecting her rather as Paul's vision on the Road to Damascus did him, although the experience was one of darkness, not of light. ...Black Dogs is curious and at times unpleasant. In the end, you can, as Bernard would, dismiss it as just a story, or, like June, you can look deeper and ponder the ideas further." [Courtesy of Ann Skea]
Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat was crazy; a crazy Englishwoman in Rome. So far it's by my least favorite book from her. Cross Channel by Julian Barnes is a collection of short stories about English people who have settled in northern France, and I'm talking Middle Ages, post-World War II, any time. It's a pretty good collection. I'm looking forward to reading more of Barnes.

And that, as they say, is that.

The will of Zeus was moving toward its end.

2012-01-05T13:34:00.000-08:00

"The will of Zeus was moving toward its end. If ever I roofed a shrine to please your heart,...now bring my prayer to pass...your arrows for my tears!"

[The Iliad, Book I., Homer, translated by Robert Fagles.]

Such is a mere clip from Thomas Cahill's book, Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter. The book was the last I finished in the year 2011.

It was brilliant, and I have read Cahill before (How the Irish Saved Civilization and Mysteries of the Middle Ages), and I can tell you he brings history alive, he reanimates the atmosphere, the people, and in this book the very syntax of life from 2000 B.C. through the conquest of Greece by Philip of Macedon, and you will like it, because he makes it so.

Nonfiction Books Read During 2011

Retreating through the past year, I must say it's been a bitch of a year personally, financially, and occupationally, but what a grand time as far as books go! I've had a Great Reading Year, and beg your indulgence for allowing me to share it with you. First I will tackle the nonfiction, and then in a subsequent post, I’ll do the fiction.

In January, there was Orhan Pamuk’s The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist, and Home Town by Tracy Kidder. Pamuk’s book was his collected lectures at Harvard, pieces of which I’ve excerpted here on this blog; and Kidder’s book was a heartwarming, charming story of a small town in Massachusetts told from the point of view of a policeman. My uncle, Joseph Zipoli, was an admired and respected cop of some notoriety in my home town of Meriden, Connecticut. I could surely see many of the plights and aggravations of small-town law enforcement mirrored in the pages of Kidder’s book and in the coffee-bruised sunken eyes of my uncle, and the toll it took on him and his family.

In February, it was the hilarious travel adventures recounted in Pico Iyer’s Video Night in Kathmandu. This book, like Iyer’s others, is so filled with the comic moments and alien-dark bizarre life of our fellow earthlings, that I could not put the book down. My favorite chapter was on Hong Kong.

Steven Rinella

I read Steven Rinella’s American Buffalo in April, as well as The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, Operation Mincemeat by Ben MacIntyre, and Rinella’s other book The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine. Rinella, as you may know, used to have a show on TV called "The Wild Within." It was fascinating, entertaining, informative, and I highly recommend the whole opus when it comes to Rinella.

Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, is more than an expansion of The Man Who Never Was; it is a brilliant exciting fact-filled and humorous account of that whole affair. If you study WW2, you must read this book. Gladwell’s Tipping Point took me places that I was unprepared for; understanding how society moves and breathes, and telling it in such a fascinating way, anthropology never had it so good.

In May, my man Thomas Cahill thrilled me with Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe. The Amazon.com blurb says it all: “On visits to the great cities of Europe—monumental Rome; the intellectually explosive Paris of Peter Abelard and Thomas Aquinas; the hotbed of scientific study that was Oxford; and the incomparable Florence of Dante and Giotto—Cahill brilliantly captures the spirit of experimentation, the colorful pageantry, and the passionate pursuit of knowledge that built the foundations for the modern world.”

June 2011 found me returning to Malcolm Gladwell with Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. “Blink reveals that great decision makers aren't those who process the most information or spend the most time deliberating, but those who have perfected the art of "thin-slicing"-filtering the very few factors that matter from an overwhelming number of variables.” So they say.

I also read Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed World, and indeed it did. Excellent book. And it has taken me 55 years to get over my dislike of fishy fish, like cod, and now I love it.

Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks and Packing for Mars by Mary Roach kept me busy in July. Musicophila was especially poignant for me since most mornings I wake up with amazingly stupid songs in my head and wonder if I’ve been abducted during the night and aliens played 1970s radio the whole time they were probing me. Mary Roach’s book was funny, informative, and scary since she deals with the romantic aspirations of astronauts and uptight NASA officials.

In August it was Bill Bryson’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life. I couldn’t believe how he wove what he did into a well-written, remarkable history of each and every room in your house. I love Bill Bryson. You can’t go wrong with any of his books.

Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell brought me into September. This is what you’re getting into with his book: “Outliers: The Story of Success examines the factors that contribute to high levels of success. ...[Gladwell] examines the causes of why the majority of Canadian ice hockey players are born in the first few months of the calendar year, how Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates achieved his extreme wealth, and how two people with exceptional intelligence end up with such vastly different fortunes.” We’re dealing with the "10,000-Hour Rule" and it is captivating reading.

The Outlaw Sea by William Langewiesche was an eye-opening account of how little we know about how devastating the Sea can be, from pirates, to storms, to oil tankers falling apart, to well almost everything. I think I’ll take a plane.

Hometowns, edited by the late John Preston, introduced October 2011. In this book are collected essays by gay American authors who talk about growing up in their hometowns. At times it was quite an emotional read, but I found that the overall affirmation was one of finding one’s niche in the world, and often in the most unlikely places. I also read Douglas Waller’s Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage.

It was a good book, I liked Donovan more than I thought I would, even though he was often an unlikeable fellow. One can’t deny his bravery or his belief in raising intelligence in the U.S. to an art form without the bigoted and infected mindset of people like J. Edgar Hoover, who is all over this book, insidious, backstabbing, lying.

In November it was Inside the KGB by Vladimir Kuzichkin, a former KGB officer (the name is a pseudonym). Probably some of the most boring writing I’ve ever come across in espionage-related texts; however, the insights he provides into the workings of the Soviet Communist Party and its legion of operatives are unbelievable: the fact that the USSR lasted as long as it did is a miracle: Corruption, stupidity, incompetence, drunkenness, permeated the KGB and GRU to the point of absurdity.

December it was My Life in France by Julia Child; it is a lovely audio book; however, I would “read” it during my lunch hour, before I ate, and the constant descriptions of the food she cooked, the recipes, the ecstasy of her restaurant visits literally drove my stomach to exponential hunger pangs.

Julia Child

Also read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, in which she describes a year of life in western Virginia, and her family’s commitment to completely organic and locally grown foods and livestock. It was amusing and very educational.

Just Kids by Patti Smith was read by my entire household. It is well-written, nostalgic, entertaining, and at times highly self-absorbed, which is for the most part what I thought of her and Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography. It did not detract from their sweetness, nor did it impact my enjoyment of the book.

Last Night I Dreamed of Peace is a posthumous memoir of Dang Thuy Tram, who was a field doctor for the North Vietnamese army, stationed in the central highlands, during 1968-1970. It was quite a heart-breaking account of little more than two years (in journal entries). The hardships and daily suffering that both civilians and soldiers endured while fighting a war of liberation is a moving storythat most people in this county know absolutely nothing about. Sadly enough, I wonder if they will ever want to know. Time does not heal all wounds. Then came Sailing the Wine Dark Sea by Cahill and Falling Off the Map by Pico Iyer. Iyer’s book focused on the Lonely Places on Earth. His reportage of Paraguay and Iceland I read out loud to my friends, as it had me cracking up.

More to follow, the fiction list, probably tomorrow.

Orhan Pamuk says #3: "Lost his taste for coffee, he also lost his mind."

2011-12-26T11:21:00.000-08:00

Shah Tahmasp

"...the Persian Shah Tahmasp, who was the archenemy of the Ottomans, as well as the world's greatest patron-king of the art of painting, began to grow senile and lost his enthusiasm for wine, music, poetry, and painting: furthermore, he quit drinking coffee, and naturally, his brain stopped working.

"One day when he had grown even older, he was possessed by a jinn, had a nervous fit and, begging God's forgiveness, completely swore off wine, handsome young boys, and painting, which is proof enough that after this great shah lost his taste for coffee, he also lost his mind."

A jinn

Text: Pamuk, Orhan. My Name Is Red, Translated from the Turkish by Erdag M. Goknar, New York: Vintage Books, 2001, pp. 47-48.

Page 117: If you know, Elijah, why do you pursue me?

2011-10-20T07:10:00.000-07:00

From page 117 of the book: It spoke back to me: 'If you know, Elijah, why do you pursue me?' The voice was deep, very bass. It sounded electric, like it was speaking through impulses, you know, electrical impulses, or bees and mosquitoes that are on fire. There was a lot of humming going on."

Sarah shivered with disgust.

"'I'm not Elijah,' I replied," continued Revenant. "'You managed to keep yourself well, Elijah,' it said to me. I told him again my name wasn't Elijah. I don't appreciate being called a prophet. 'Why are you bothering me now?' it asked. 'Am I your fountain? Must you drink again so soon, Elijah?' Well, my friends, I was confused. Then he went down the stairs and rummaged in my cellar."

Elijah fed by an angel
painting by Ferdinand Bol, 1600-1663

"I followed him and chased him around some cardboard boxes, my bookshelves, around corners and pillars. It was a race. I wasn't up for a race, but I was always riding on the shadow of the light, never seeing its source. Then," he stopped and sipped from his glass and caught his breath. "Suddenly it stopped. I said to it, 'I'm not here to ask you for anything.' I could see the tail of the light from where I stood. 'I'm not a beggar!' I shouted. 'And besides, you woke me up!' I called to it. 'You weren't asleep,' it said. He was right, of course," Revenant looked at me and smiled. "I wasn't asleep. 'Well,' I said, 'I was going to. Why won't you let me see you?' I asked. There was no response from it. 'You hold it against me for the way I save souls, don't you?' I asked. Still there was no answer from the light. 'Well?' I said. Then the light vibrated, like fast breathing, you know. 'I'm aware that you don't want another Messiah,' I said. 'God knows we've had enough. We get rid of them, don't we, fast, vite, like always?'

Then the light moved away from where it was and whirled past my back and flew up the goddam stairs. As I reached the top stair, because I was goddammed if I was staying in the cellar, the light exploded. It was so bright that it blinded me."

Page 116: The light moved like a thief would, you know, from one point to another.

2011-10-20T06:49:00.000-07:00

From page 116 of the book:
"I was about to tell Owen and Sarah of a vision I had last night," said Revenant. "I wonder seriously if it was, in fact, not another vision but real."
Before I could fill a glass with wine, before I could fill a plate with cheese and a slice of bread with garlic and parsley, I had to ascertain how the hell Fr. Revenant came to be sitting in my living room, before I could tell Owen and Sarah how I met the priest, before the chance that Owen would have to explain to me how he met him.

"Just be quiet and eat, will you?" Owen said to me, tossing more shells at the fireplace.

According to Fr. Revenant, as he had passed the door to his spare bedroom, he'd heard an unrecognizable thump on the stairs leading to the first floor. He hurried to the top of the stairwell and followed the diminishing traces of a radiant, blinding light moving from the living room and into the kitchen.

"'Who are you? What are you doing here?' I heard the voice say," related Revenant in an excited voice. "The light moved like a thief would, you know, from one point to another. Then it stopped. I ran down the stairs, spilling my brandy. I cursed and then I followed the light wherever it went. It left the kitchen and opened the cellar door and stayed just inside the staircase, waiting for me."

[Top photo courtesy of Chasing Light music band.]

A new short story for your reading pleasure entitled: "Miss Wimbish"

2011-09-20T07:20:00.000-07:00

Miss Wimbish

by Mark Zipoli

Once in a while; now, understand me here, most of the time my priorities are set in order, but sometimes, sometimes a man calls in extra time and prayer for those basic human needs, things in which we believe nothing is better to behold than seeing what you don’t see as opposed to what is. And that’s when I asked myself if red meat could mean a lot more to a man than pussy.

Now, don’t get me wrong here, steak isn’t extraordinary, even though I’ve got a porterhouse on my barbecue right this minute, but having your life cut in half or for that matter cutting your life in half yourself, it can make you look bad. That’s where Miss Wimbish comes in. She’s got a backside to her that only Napa Valley and a strong commitment to love could mold. You look at those California grapes, messed around with by cobwebs, dirt and the heat of the sun and you can’t believe that it is from them that so much of life’s pleasure is bounced around and given to you. It was like that with Miss Wimbish’s face and behind. Her smooth skin and clean hair were nothing special, but when she bent over, well, to hell with the Crusades and subatomic particles, what I’m seeing is the radiance of God.

Now, don’t get me wrong here, my experience with black women is next to nothing, which means nil. But the panty-less exposure of that rainbow of heaven when Miss Wimbish bent over the kinkajou set down a new chapter in my life. And I have my petty, racist, bigoted neighbors Jim and Margie to thank for it. It began with an accident, as in a fall, and a one-sided conversation:

“Margie, I told you; if you tell me where the cash is I’ll call the paramedics.”

Margie groaned, her chopped breathing emitted not the slightest indication of understanding what her husband Jim was saying. She lie face down on the kitchen’s cold tile floor. The air conditioning was working beautifully, as it had always done, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, year in and year out.

“If I don’t know where the cash is,” Jim said peering directly over his wife, her summer dress spread out, the collar stained from her bleeding head wound. “I said, if I don’t know where the cash is, how am I going to run things?! You’ve been lame crazy up to this point, and I won’t stand it any longer. You want the paramedics? Then, goddam it, tell me where you put the cash.”

In the manufactured cold and quiet of the house, entombing just the two of them, Jim stood wearing a short-sleeve camp shirt, Bermuda shorts, and sandals to finish off his brown, sun-spotted, hairless legs. He held their 6-pound pet kinkajou cradled in his arms. The kinkajou, its long tail wrapped around Jim’s wrinkled upper arm, blinked once or twice and looked from Jim to Margie and then to the two ribeye steaks sizzling with a feline sincerity on their new stove, and then to the two half-full glasses of cabernet on the kitchen counter.

“I hope you don’t think I’m kidding, lover, because I’m not. You tell me and then I’ll call the paramedics.”

Florida had been unkind to Jim and Margie, it had made them old and private, uncooperative and somewhat saurian, their skin dry even in the humid tropical sun worshipped by their neighbors. Each wore a hair style that gave their heads a somewhat oval shape, a pomaded slickness that conflicted with the Kentucky blue-blooded ancestry in which they prided themselves.

Jim and Margie originally came from Kentucky, the right part, that is: Jessamine County. People raised thoroughbred horses there, also Berkshire hogs, Saxony sheep, and Belgian Blue cattle. During World War II, Jim had been a brave and revered bomber pilot of the 8^th Air Force’s 446^th Bomber Group. And after the War, he’d gone to work for Pan Am, becoming in a short time a Master Pilot.

Jim also became a specialist in recognizing the benefits of doing a good turn: that is, keeping his mouth shut when he should. So that, after retirement, he flew people privately, all around the world, rich people, politicians, you name it. That made him a lot of money.

Margie had her own income. She was High Society, and received a four-thousand-dollar check every month from the bank in Jessamine County, thanks to a long-held, deep-pocketed family trust of suspicious origin. When Margie received her check, she cashed it and brought the money home. She didn’t trust the banks in Florida. This irritated Jim beyond repair, because he was a believer in money making money, he believed in banks. Margie believed in cleverly disguised wicker baskets. She also believed in hidden blankets rolled up and concealing thousands of dollars, and potted plants with separated bottoms to hold wads of twenty-dollar bills, and unused heavy winter coats with sheets of money sewn into the linings. She never told anyone where she was hiding it, or why. She was a maniac and a master at the same time.

It was on Jim’s Pan Am salary and then his private flying bonuses that he and Margie and their son Jim Jr. lived. It was Jim who’d bought the house. It was Jim who’d laid the carpets down, landscaped the yard, bought the car, decided which college Jim Jr. attended, decided what furniture would be bought and what would be discarded. It was Jim and the money he earned from Pan Am and flying the rich and famous that decided most of the domestic composition of their off-to-the-side pantry of a life. Margie’s money kept coming in, and she kept finding new places to hide it.

But Jim was no less parsimonious than Margie, in fact, he was more so. He was the kind of man who would never spend a professional dollar if he could spend an unprofessional thirty cents.

Once he’d get his 30 cents worth from the job, because he’d hire skips and guys who said they knew what they were doing, but they didn’t, ever, he would belch and moan about the abuse and thievery of low-lifes and then call his neighbor, me, Good Ol’ Charlie, to repair the wrongs that had been done to him.

Although the Florida sun had been unkind to Jim and Margie, it still gave them someone like me; it gave them Good Ol’ Charlie, and I lived next door.

“Jim, what d’you expect?” I would laugh at him. “You’re so cheap. You have to spend some money if you want something done right.”

Then Good Ol’ Charlie would fix the poorly executed job, doing it right this time because I’m a perfectionist, and then, if I was lucky, I’d get the same unprofessional 30 cents from Jim, or sometimes nothing, sometimes just a thanks, and Jim still saved at least forty cents on his dollar.

Everything that Jim and Margie were, their son Jim Jr. was not. Where they were frugal, suspicious, self-righteous, and mean, Jim Jr. was clearly the opposite. He made friends easily, gave most of his allowance to poorer students, and went to a good college and obtained an engineering degree. He was recruited by McDonnell-Douglas, and designed engines and flew experimental planes in Missouri. He took chances in the air where his father had remained constant. He was held in high-esteem by his coworkers and was recommended to NASA for a job. That was his first rejection. They’d obtained his medical records and found that he was sick with multiple sclerosis. Then things got worse for him. From an MRI, doctors discovered he had Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, that rare fatal degenerative disease of the central nervous system.

One day, years prior to Margie’s fall, Jim Jr., still in St. Louis, and confined to a wheelchair and continuous home visits by a nurse, wanted to come home to Florida, to his mom and dad, to die. He’d given away all of his money, cashed in his life insurance policy, and disbursed thousands of dollars, money that his parents had given him over the years, to various environmental groups.

“That might be a problem, son,” remarked Jim.

“Why’s that, Dad?”

“You’re in a wheelchair.”

“So, the house is all one-floor, right?”

“You can’t bring your wheelchair home with you ‘cause I just had the carpets replaced, and you’ll make dents in the rug.”

Functional shifts in families are always made, more often than not they are made by the child, almost never by the parent, but Jim Jr. came home to Florida to die.

As Jim and Margie got older, and as Jim could no longer fly the private elite, he and his wife began to sleep in separate rooms. They lived separately and quietly on memories of the War, of Kentucky blue grass, and the joy they took in possessing their pet kinkajou, an animal no larger than a mature cat with large eyes, small ears, beautiful honey colored coat of brushed fur, and a long manipulating tail. The only other living breathing constant thing in their enameled lives became the influx and management of cash. Without violence or breakage, they had forgotten about their son. Without the emission of tears, they’d shed compassion the way a snake sheds skin: they’d begun to dry up together.

Then Margie fell in the kitchen and hit her head against the stone wall around the oven.

“I’m calling Charlie,” Jim said, disgusted, beaten. “And it’s your own damn fault. You fell. You got yourself into this mess. But by Jesus he’s not going to call the paramedics either, because he knows what a horse’s ass you’re being.”

In less than a minute, I came through the back door.

“Jim, did you call the paramedics?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because Margie won’t tell me where the cash is.”

“Jim, you have to call the paramedics.”

“No I don’t, Charlie.”

At that moment, I took off my shirt, rolled it up into a ball, and placed it behind her neck for support.

“Turn off the fire on the grill, Jim.”

Margie groaned again then said: “Toss that fucking monkey on the grill and call an ambulance, god damn you,” she pleaded in a moist whisper, a last gasp before unconsciousness.

“Charlie,” said Jim. “I told her that I wouldn’t call an ambulance unless she told me where she put her cash. It’s as simple as that.” His hands absent-mindedly petted the kinkajou, as he stared out the front window. Then I called the paramedics.

Margie was taken to the hospital and remained there for two weeks. She was put through tests and rehabilitative work, and then an MRI, a CAT-scan, and more blood tests. It was discovered that she was dying from a disease of the blood. She was actually dying in more ways than one, and that road was a straight one, straight to the cemetery.

Jim never visited his wife while she was in the hospital. Not once did he go and see his ailing, lonely, hallucinating wife in her hospital bed with tubes and bandages and pulleys and everything else an old woman like that didn’t need.

The attending physician explained over the telephone to Jim that Margie was going to need constant convalescent care. And Jim told the attending physician that he didn’t want to have anything to do with it.

“What’s wrong with you, Jim?” I’d asked him, as we stood in the spotlessly clean Florida room, its windows looking out onto the back yard, brought shadows to the eyes as the sun was blotted temporarily by a low passing cloud. Jim was sifting through a trunk filled with mementoes and handed me a decrepit milk-chocolate colored eyeglass case.

“Vintage World War Two Ray-Bans,” Jim said, pointing to the brassy frames with light-green unscratched lenses. “I know, because they’re mine. They’re in mint condition. There’s an inscription there on the inside flap.” Written in ink on the inside, I read: “Jim Cawl 1944 Hope I come back.”

“I can’t stop it, Charlie. You think I’m crazy! Well, I’m not,” Jim exclaimed, startling the kinkajou out of his arms and causing it to run for cover behind my legs. I’d asked him about him and Margie.

“I’d give everything you might want to think of if I could outlive Margie. It’d make everything worthwhile. You don’t have a name for it, do you?”

“For what?”

“For this non-feeling I have.”

“You don’t feel a thing for Margie?” I asked.

“No.”

“Nothing?”

“Not a thing. Here, this hat goes good with the glasses.” Jim tossed me a black Pan Am pilot’s cap. It had a gold braid around it, and the blue and gold Pan Am logo was dead center in front. Wings stretched out from the logo and three stars, boxed beneath the image of the globe, showed that it was a Master Pilot’s hat. In the mirror hanging on the garage wall, I saw how good I’d look with the cap and sunglasses and a thick juicy steak. We were well-matched.

A week later Jim packed up Margie and moved her back to Kentucky so she could go into a home and be near some of her family. He bought a condo just outside of Jessamine County, but kept the Florida house just in case.

About a month after he moved into the condo, being settled and content, Jim broke his hip while chasing the kinkajou. In recuperation from hip surgery, he developed pneumonia, and found himself living in the same home as Margie. They were, in fact, down the hall from each other.

As the weeks moved on, Margie and Jim both became worse from their individual afflictions. The nurses were amused at their rivalry, as each strove to see who would outlast the other. The pair was always asking the nurses how close to death the other was, continuously monitoring the amount of traffic between the front desk and each other’s rooms. What was certain and known to each was that neither had long to live. Jim wanted Margie’s cash, and Margie wanted to go back home to Florida. Jim was convinced that Margie would die before him, that he had absolutely nothing to gain if he stopped thinking about her progress, and so began to think of his own.

Most of the nurses in the convalescent home tried not to participate actively in the race for survival, and while husband and wife believed thoroughly that the women could be enlisted in the service of each and the abandonment of the other, all but one stayed strangely impersonal.

Althea Wimbish, a young athletic black nurse, with hair pushed high and away from her beautiful forehead, so as to look like she wore an ultra-fashionable hat perched atop ultra-fashionable hair a la Christian Lacroix, was the one exception. Her trademark, that of tapping a Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2 pencil on the counter, the wall, a window sill, lamp shade, flower vase, water pitcher or whatever hard surface there was available when she entered a room and before she left it, was either a sign of coming to order or a dismissal that things were status quo. She was activating her point in Time.

“I am what people expect me to be,” she told Jim Cawl.

“Well, honey,” he said. “I hope you don’t have too much invested in that line of thought.”

“It’s done well by me.”

“You’re a black nurse in a white old folks’ home waiting on our expiration dates and listening to our cries for help, Miss Wimbish. How good can it be?”

Although he never failed to carry on a conversation with her, he only reluctantly gave himself up for blood pressure and temperature tests, and other more personal invasions of his privacy.

“You grumble, Mr. Cawl, because you still don’t trust me. How long have you been here; quite a while now, and you think I’ve got old shoes and dirt on my feet? Let me help you with that,” she winced as she settled his pillow at a sharper angle.

“My mother didn’t wash other people’s clothes, Mr. Cawl, nor did she shape nylon stockings over wooden forms in some dingy sweatshop. She worked at New Departure making ball bearings in Bristol, Connecticut, if you must know. My track scholarship to U.Conn paid for my nursing education, and then I got my master’s from NYU. So don’t worry about me and the rest of those stupid presuppositions you were born with here in Jessamine County. ‘Cause while I’m a nurse, I’m still better than your average convalescent home doctor. You can call the doctor, but he’ll never respond as often or as thoroughly as I will. You’ll have to get used to that.”

What he had difficulty getting used to was her perfect bottom quarters, that camouflaged rainbow of heaven; that’s what he couldn’t get used to I’ll bet.

One night she opened his door, tapped four times with her Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2 on the glass pitcher of water and announced she was going to read to him.

“It’s Marshall Zhukov’s Memoirs,” she said.

He shot her a look of ghastly discomfort and turned his head the other way.

“Go away,” he said.

“Why, ‘cause he was a Russian?”

“No. I have great respect for Zhukov.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

She waited out his clumsy pause, which took nearly a full minute to expire.

“…Oh, I get it. You mean do I get extra pay for reading to my patients? And will it cost you? No, Mr. Cawl, I don’t. This is gratis. So you can relax your crack and let me take us back to Soviet Russia before the big war. I like this part,” her thumb opened the book, “where Zhukov falls in love with his landlady’s daughter.”

“How much do you know about people like me?” Jim asked her out of the blue, while she was reading.

Angling for an end to his vituperation, she sat upright and looked him dead in the eyes.

“I know enough to tell you that there’s still a bit of bubbling or crackling sounds in your lungs, which we call rales, and some rumblings we refer to as rhonchi; they signal the presence of thick liquid, which means you have a while to go to get better. You talk more than you should, and so you exhibit whispered pectoriloquy, like when you’re in a movie theater and you don’t think other people can hear you loudly whispering to Margie. That tells me parts of your lungs are stiff; it’s called consolidation. I’m aware of your high white blood cell count and your low blood sodium. In your condition it’s due to an anti-diuretic hormone produced when the lungs are diseased.”

Jim looked at the ceiling: “Hmf.”

“You used to be a smoker, Mr. Cawl.”

He turned his head to Miss Wimbish and smiled: “Is that what they call sexy men in your set?”
“No, Mr. Cawl. In my set, a sexy man is called somebody else’s husband.”

“Goddam,” Jim shuddered. “You make me so tense. I wish we were on a mountain top and I could shove you off. I mean it.”

“What kind of a thing is that to say?”

“Who gives a shit? I don’t. I’ve lived my life not caring about what goes on in broad daylight. I’ve made a gift of it, in fact. …You can laugh now.”

“No I can’t. My Father used to tell me ‘where pity dwells, the peace of God is there.’ I couldn’t laugh at you, Mr. Cawl.”

“…I think we ought to go back to Zhukov and his little Maria,” Jim said.

On the fourth Sunday of September, at five o’clock in the morning, there was a deathly silence on the floor, and Jim was convinced it was due to his wife’s passing. Jim looked to the sliding door of his room’s balcony, the drapes had been left open, and the light of the stars over the open field beyond the grounds of the home was all he could see. But he was failing. What’s the use of struggling if she’s dead? I’m almost dead, he thought as he heard the tapping Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2 on his bed rail.

There, tucked securely and in the divergent and distrustful glance of the stars, his hand gestures revealed to Miss Wimbish how he had just felt like vomiting, which signaled a repulsion within him as compensation for the little white-stone bits of alertness and observation afforded to someone with whom you have an unemotional connection:

“I wish they wouldn’t burden the unlikely and the likely all in one place.”

“Well, I know, but hospitals are a place of reformation, Mr. Cawl,” she said, holding a glass of water up to his lips so that he could calm his thirst. “The doctors worship transcriptions and tests for every man, for every dilapidated soul they imagine comes their way for answers…and for release.”

Miss Wimbish patted his forearm before she replaced the glass on the moveable counter and stepped toward the door.

“What do you think her chances are?” he asked Miss Wimbish.

“Oh, don’t worry, Mr. Cawl,” she said turning her back on him. “Your wife will be dead before the dawn, then your little game can end and you can go back home.”

He sighed with relief.

“An hour to go,” he whispered, and relaxed some more.

And because he relaxed, because the vigilance of his immune system--kept alive by the need to conquer without seeming to want to--had up to now enabled his circulation to function in tune with the medicine, there now came the shock of the stroke that obliterated his brain, and the oceanic wave inside his lungs, as they filled with fluid as dramatically as the effects of a Venturi tube.

He suffered no indication to Miss Wimbish, as she tapped her pencil on the light plate before closing the door behind her, that he’d altered his status from the greedy and myopic husband of the woman down the hall to the nonfunctioning corpse of a once brave and revered bomber pilot of the 8^th Air Force’s 446^th Bomber Group. He frowned, and then he gave up the ghost.

It was already Halloween when I was cutting back my overgrown bougainvillea on the fence, while waiting for a porterhouse steak and a thick-sliced red onion to fuse themselves on my barbecue, that I chased another two-foot iguana out of my yard (those bastards eat everything and shit all over the place), when I leaned over the chain-link fence and waved at an old woman with drooping porcelain skin accompanied by a young black woman in scrubs. At their feet, a honey-colored kinkajou pranced about playing with their shoe laces. The black nurse took a pencil out of her hair and used it to direct the old lady’s attention to me. The old woman, her body stiff from age and recuperation, turned toward me and smiled. And as if in a close-up from a movie, I could see her zoom in on my Pan Am Master pilot cap and the Ray Bans sunglasses which her husband had once worn. A smile appeared on her face as she gave an exaggerated collusive wink.

Then, with a short arrhythmic glance, Nurse Wimbish, her back to me, bent over to watch a rough green snake making its way along the grass into a cluster of night-blooming jasmine. My eyes were glued to the rainbow of happiness that was her, and it was all over for me. I hopped the fence, and left the other half of my life behind me.

John Cowper Powys Championship Page - Post #5 - An Appreciation: Essay on Wolf Solent from "The Lectern"

2011-09-17T14:52:00.000-07:00

The following essay is from a website called "The Lectern." I am indebted to the author, who refers to himself simply as Murr, for allowing me to reproduce his erudite and insightful literary excursion through one of the most brilliant and beautiful books of the 20th century--John Cowper Powys' "Wolf Solent." You can access his website by clicking here. I hope you enjoy it.

"Wolf Solent" John Cowper Powys

He had come more and more to regard 'reality' as a mere name given to the most lasting and most vivid among all the various impressions of life which each individual experiences. ... One of his own most permanent impressions had always been of the nature of an extreme dualism in which every living thing was compelled to take part.

Nomos and physis

This book operates on two distinct levels. The first level is a Lawrentian story of adultery and cuckoldry in a small English country town. Wolf Solent arrives in the town where he was born, after an absence of many years, to take up the post of secretary to the local squire. He falls in love with and marries Gerda, the daughter of the local stonemason. At the same time, he develops an ineluctable passion for the daughter of the local bookseller, Christie. His young wife is carrying on an affair with her childhood sweetheart, while Christie is fighting off the incestuous advances of her own father. Meanwhile, the squire is feuding with the vicar, and both are feuding with the local poet. There is lots of social observation, village fetes, afternoon tea, walks down leafy lanes, and a wealth of eccentric and eccentrically named characters. The novel is focalised through the eponymous protagonist, a highly educated, morbidly sensitive young man, the possessor of a 'mythology', and the story is largely about how he loses this personal mythology and becomes socialised in the world, a Dostoevskyan tale of how a young ego grows up and comes to terms with the disillusionment consequent on greater maturity and experience.

The second level, however, is really about something much deeper: man's relationship to nature, and the tension between human culture and society, and the natural world and its cyclical processes. On his journey to his hometown, Solent reflects on religion: ...It seemed as though all the religions in the world were nothing but so many creaking and splashing barges, whereon the souls of men ferried themselves over those lakes of primal silence, disturbing the swaying water-plants that grew there and driving away shy water fowl. Here, human culture, symbolised by religion, symbolised by creaking barges, floats on top of the primal lake of nature, barely disturbing it, but leaving no real lasting impact or impression. The book is really about the age old tension between nomos (society) and physis (nature), a tension first articulated by the Greeks.

The tension between these two, nomos and physis, is presented in two ways: by Solent's thoughts, and by the narrative voice, including plot and description.

Solent's Thoughts

Solent, as an educated man, sees the world in terms of Greek mythology. At times of stress he utters the Greek lament: Ailinon, Ailinon (Woe!) from Aeschylus, and he is aware of nymphs, dryads and other mythical creatures lurking in the undergrowth. Powys underpins all his novels with a mythical foundation, usually Arthurian or from the Mabinogion. Wolf Solent is unusual in using classical Greek mythology as a foundation, underlining further the nomos - physis dialogue.

Solent is acutely aware of nature, and of his position as a consciousness- endowed being in nature: nature was always prolific of signs and omens to his mind; and it had become a custom with him to keep a region of his intelligence alert and passive for a thousand whispers, hints, obscure intimations that came to him in this way. At key moments in the novel, he succumbs to reveries about nature and his position -as a representative of humanity- in nature. He has the ability, shared with the squire, to see things stripped of the mischief of custom. He constantly has flashes of intuition, in which the social world appears as superficial, and the natural world as the only reality: my world is essentially a manifold world. He exists in a kind of suspended state between cosmic immensity, and microscopic detail, a kind of Blakean vision of the whole world in a grain of sand. In the face of the primal silence of nature, the social conventional dilemma in which he finds himself - married to one woman but in love with another - appears meaningless and trivial, a creaking barge, merely the mischief of custom.

In a key passage, Solent engages in an imaginary dialogue with the skull of his dead father (the disembodied head is a key motif for Cowper Powys, and one that comes from the Mabinogion). Wolf asserts that reality is an illusion caused by consciousness, while his father asserts that the only reality is the natural world: "There is no reality but what the mind fashions out of itself. There is nothing but a mirror opposite a mirror, and a round crystal opposite a round crystal, and a sky in water opposite water in a sky, " asserts Wolf. "Ho! Ho! You worm of my folly," laughs the skull, "Life is beyond your mirrors and your waters. It's at the bottom of your pond, it's in the body of your sun, it's in the dust of your star spaces, it's in the eyes of weasels and the nose of rats and the pricks of nettles and the tongues of vipers and the spawn of frogs and the slime of snails."

Wolf believes that every human being is the possessor of a 'life illusion', a motivating force that underpins all interactions with the world and which defines the character of each person. To a certain extent, the novel is about how Wolf loses his 'life illusion' and ultimately sees that the real purpose of life is to forget and to enjoy, to endure and to escape, to surrender nomos in the face of physis. This takes place in the arena of a struggle between his mother, and his father. His mother represents nomos: What's the use of tilting against conventions? It's more amusing, it's more interesting, to play with these things. They're as real as anything else, she says. His father represents physis: "Life in me still, you worm of my folly, and girls' flesh is sweet for ever and ever; and honey is sticky and tears are salt, and yellow hammers' eggs have mischievous crooked scrawls."

The Narrative Voice

In the plot, the nomos - physis tension exists, as we have seen, in the social conventions of Wolf's marriage and the various adulteries surrounding it, and how these conventions appear when set against the natural world of physical love and procreation. Another key area in which this tension exists is in sex.

Nomos sanctions certain kinds of sexuality, and outlaws others, while physis has no attitude at all towards them. From the point of view of physis, all kinds of sexuality are natural, and sexual identity is seen as much more complicated than a mere hetero-homo duality. Nothing is against nature. That's the mistake people make, and it causes endless unhappiness. The minor characters all embody different kinds of sexuality: the bookseller Malakite and his two daughters embody incest; Wolf's own father, a promiscuous but now dead figure, embodies rampant heterosexuality uncomplicated by convention; the squire's obsession with Wolf's predecessor, the young man Redfern, represents a suppressed necrophilia; there are various homosexual relationships suggested between the vicar and the local poet, and Wolf himself is aroused by the sight of two village youths swimming naked in the local pond. One of these youths is his wife's lover, and Wolf is fascinated by the sight of the young man's genitals floating on the surface of the pond. His jealousy is tinged with envy. Celibacy is represented by the hideously ugly spinster Selena Gault who nurtures an undying but unreciprocated passion for Wolf's father; conventionalised sexuality is represented by Wolf's mother. Considering the book appeared in 1929, Cowper Powys was way ahead of his time both in his ideas about sexuality and in his depiction of it.

The book balances descriptions of social life with nature, and it is in these last that the enduring power of the book lies. No other prose writer in the language comes close to the power of Cowper Powys's writing on nature. His prose descriptions of the natural world can best be compared with the nature poetry of John Clare, Blake and Dylan Thomas. Cowper Powys can take us in one sentence from the furthest reaches of cosmic space to a drop of water on a frog's back.

His writing has an intensity of vision that lingers in the mind long after the book has ended, and which enhances the way we view our surroundings. If greatness in art is measured by its ability to rattle us, to change the very way we perceive the world, this book is very great art indeed.

My 'I am I' is no hard, small crystal inside me, but a cloudy, a vapour, a mist, a smoke hovering round my skull, hovering around my spine, my arms, my legs. That's what I am, a vegetable animal wrapped in a mental cloud, and with the will-power to project this cloud into the consciousness of others.

John Cowper Powys Championship Page: Redux Post #4 "He was drenched through and through with darkness and with peace."

2011-09-13T11:50:00.000-07:00

It was as though he had suddenly emerged, by some hidden doorway, into a world entirely composed of vast, cool, silent-growing vegetation, a world where no men, no beasts, no birds, broke the mossy stillness; a world of sap and moisture and drooping ferns; a world of leaves that fell and fell forever, leaf upon leaf;

a world where that which slowly mounted upwards endured eternally the eternal lapse of that which slowly settled downwards; a world that itself was slowly settling down, leaf upon leaf, grass-blade upon grass-blade, towards some cool, wet, dark, unutterable dimension in the secret heart of silence!

Lying upon that rank, drenched grass, he drew a deep sigh of obliterating release. ...Ah! how his human consciousness sank down into that with which all terrestrial consciousness began!...

He was a leaf among leaves...among large, cool, untroubled leaves.... He had fallen back into the womb of his real mother... He was drenched through and through with darkness and with peace.

(From John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent, Chapter 18, "The School Treat")

John Cowper Powys Championship Page: Post #3 "What came over the mind of the heretic priest at that moment was a certain day, years and years ago..."

2011-09-01T10:02:00.000-07:00

(During the 1980s, after Wolf Solent, Weymouth Sands, and the Autobiography, I then read Ducdame. I followed that with Maiden Castle. I felt that I had gone over to another world, no mirror needed, no low door in the wall, but merely the further opening of my mind to a literature and a mythology that was bigger than anything I'd ever read before.)

"What came over the mind of the heretic priest at that moment was a certain day, years and years ago, when, in the wretched playground of a second-rate preparatory school, he had watched a couple of his companions throwing handfuls of cinders taken from a galvanized iron ash bin at the body of a dead rat. He had been the laughing stock of the school even before that day for his inability to conform to their standards, but after that day his loathing for every aspect of youthful high spirits hardened into a misanthropic mania." (p. 198)

"Netta pressed instinctively closer to the clergyman's side; for the figure that followed the voice, from what seemed the very depths of a watery ditch, was strange enough to scare the most preoccupied

mind. It was that of a woman so old as to be almost beyond human recognition. Her face was not so much the colour of ashes as the colour of the inside of a white eggshell that has been exposed on

the top of a rubbish heap for many weeks. Out of this face looked forth a pair of ghastly sunken eyes, colourless now in the darkness, but possessed of some kind of demonic vitality that made both Hastings and Netta shrink and draw back, as if from the presence of something malignant and dangerous.

"'Betsy must have known 'ee was coming dearie! What else was I nursing my old bones for on way home from town? 'Twas so when the gentleman from London brought his sweetheart this way fifteen years agone. These things be writ in the stars, sweet lady; they be writ in the stars.'" (P. 201)

"Between his soul and all this enchanted spaciousness there arose a reciprocity he could not analyze, a feeling that had the irresponsibility of despair and yet was not despair, that resembled loneliness and yet was not loneliness. It was almost as if, just behind all this etherealized chemistry, there really did exist something corresponding to the old Platonic idea of a universe composed of mind-stuff, of mind-forms, rarer and more beautiful than the visible world." (p. 3)

(Glimpses of the Dorset countryside in which the novel Ducdame takes place.)

"The red coals in Lexie's grate seemed to lose something of their power. The rosy glow reflected from Lexie's crowded bookcases seemed to fade. The little blue fire devil that danced like a demon butterfly on the top of the colas flagged and drooped. A great blind streaming face was pressed against the window--the gray featureless face of the rain. It was as if a corpse-cold cloudy arm, wavering and shadowy, fumbled and plucked at those two dripping figures; as though, drenched as they were, they belonged to the drowning fields outside and not to this warm human interior."
(p. 31)

[All selections from Ducdame are courtesy of the Village Press edition, London, 1974. First published by Doubleday, Page & Co., New York, 1925.]

Remembering William Goyen (1915-1983)

2011-08-30T09:12:00.000-07:00

On this day in 1983, when my friends and I were living in Arlington, Virginia, almost a full year after having moved there from New York, William Goyen's death became known to us.

Years before, when we were still living in Jackson Heights, N.Y., it was Joe Savino who'd read about him in Book Forum, from an article by Erika Duncan, and he immediately got a copy of The House of Breath, and read it straight through. He then asked everyone he knew to read it. In 1978, Joe and I wrote him a fan letter and this was his response:

Los Angeles

September 27, 1978

Dear Joseph Savino and Mark Zipoli:

I feel bad about the long silence between your wonderful letter (4/18/1978) and mine of right now, September 27, 1978, written from my bed upon which I lie in temperature (the weather's not mine) that has ranged during the last five days between 102 and 107, recovering from unexpected surgery three weeks ago and beginning to feel my good strength again.

I am not often here, since my wife is an actress working in films and television though I do not much care for the place and prefer my own apartment (i.e., my family's and mine) and workroom in New York. And I am here, because of my illness, when I had expected to be back in New York (where I shall return, doctor willing, in early November).

By now you have weathered five months in your new life and under your beautiful new commitment you wrote to me about.* I hope you are still there; I am sure that you are; I pray that you are. Give it some more months, my friends. Writing is a lifetime's work and I have always seen it as that. It was just what I was going to do for the length of my life, no matter how cruelly it treated me, how "unsuccessful" I was, who tried to talk me out of it, counsel me about it, warn me, disparage me. I was no martyr or saint--though in memory it seems I sometimes took the stance of those (now I see, at those times when I was most afraid). I stayed away-in deserts, on mountains, in Pensions, back street bed-sitting rooms. It was the staying away that I think about now as I'm writing to you; staying away, more than hiding out or escaping. I see that I had to do this to stay with what I was writing, which took the life out of most everything else except Nature itself, took the life out of love affairs, family building, owning things, insurance, and so forth.

Did I stay away when I should have been there? And those times when I was there, my God should I have stayed away? Well, I wrote and still do, lived as a man writing, and still do. The lifetime goes on, piling up memory and feeling, which is what I go on writing about. Simplicity helped. Can one live a life of simplicity now? More than ever I fight for it. Basic daily living, a day at a time. Living in many places (while staying away). Not getting bound. Keep the senses clean, and out of the head. Whitman (I'm reading him again right now) wrote "If the body is not the soul, then what is the soul?" Feeling and trying to keep feeling true, not to fuck up feeling, trying to write from true feeling, working to get that and to find true words for it. And telling people when you care, as you do me.

I'm so glad you wrote me what you did. If you're still there--and I know you are--send me a note to let me know. Forgive my silence. God speed!

Sincerely

William Goyen

(*) In the early spring of 1978, both Joe Savino and myself had quit our jobs to pursue writing.

Who was William Goyen? As a writer, William Goyen strove to combine spiritual inquiry about the nature of man with the elements of humble daily life. His early childhood left his writing marked by the rhythms of rural speech, the Bible, and a sense of story. His father was a lumber salesman, and nearly all of Goyen's fiction is permeated with the atmosphere of the East Texas woods and small towns. His absorption with European writers did nothing to lessen his occupation with the details of the East Texas of his youth and the nuances of its speech. This attentiveness gives a strong regional flavor to those works in which Goyen attempts to recapture the atmosphere of life in East Texas during the twenties and thirties. His work has been an example to other writers who have sought to make use of the Texas past and has encouraged those whose artistry is not always appreciated in their native places. Though he left Texas early, Goyen owes more artistically to Texas than to New York and Europe, a debt that he frequently acknowledged.
William Goyen, the son of Charles & Mary Goyen, was born at Trinity, Texas, on April 24, 1915. He moved with his [family] to Houston when he was eight, and there he grew up and attended public schools and what is now Rice University. After teaching at the U. of Houston in 1939–40, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He was discharged 4½ years later and never returned to Texas. Between 1945 and 1952 he lived in New Mexico, California, Oregon, Europe, & New York. After a stay in Taos, N.M., 1952-1954, he lived principally in New York.
Goyen's first novel, The House of Breath (1950), and first book of short stories, Ghost and Flesh (1952), received much acclaim and won him two Guggenheim fellowships. His work was translated into German and French by Ernst Robert Curtius and Maurice Coindreau, and was soon established in Europe, where it remains in print in several languages. In the early 1950s, in addition to publishing another novel (In a Farther Country, 1955) and more short stories (The Faces of Blood Kindred, 1960), Goyen began to write dramatic works and adaptations of his fiction for the stage. The theater brought him into contact with actress Doris Roberts, whom he married in 1963.

Over later years Goyen taught as a visiting professor at Brown, Columbia, Princeton, the University of Southern California, [among others and worked] as an editor at McGraw-Hill, 1966-71. He published A Book of Jesus in 1973, another novel, Come, The Restorer (1974), and his Collected Stories (1975). In 1977 he received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Rice University. He moved to Los Angeles in 1975 and lived there (and in New York City) most of the rest of his life. He died in Los Angeles on August 30, 1983. (The work of his last years included an unfinished autobiography, short stories (collected posthumously), and a novel, Arcadio, published a few weeks after his death.)]

Biographical and critical text: Reginald Gibbons, "GOYEN, CHARLES WILLIAM," Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fgo32). Published by the Texas State Historical Association.

When the Furniture Is Talking, How Can You Sleep? (Orhan Pamuk says #3)

2011-08-24T09:04:00.000-07:00

      "Some nights when I get out of bed, I cannot understand why the linoleum is like this. Every square has all these lines on it. Why? And every square is different from the others ...The lamp's looking just as strange. If you can't see the lightbulb, you can imagine that the light is emanating from its zinc stem and its satin shade. You know, the way light might radiate from a person's face--something like that.
     "I know this happens to you sometimes too: So, for example, if there were a lightbulb burning inside my skull, somewhere deep inside, between my eyes and my mouth, how beautifully that light would ooze from my pores--you too are capable of such a thought. The light pouring especially from our cheeks and our foreheads: in the evenings, where there is a power cut.
     "...But you never admit to thinking such things. Neither do I. I don't tell anyone.
     "...I don't talk about these things to anyone. No one talks about such things, and so maybe I'm the only one who sees them. The attendant sense of responsibility is more than just a burden. It prompts one to ask why it is that this great secret of life is revealed only to oneself.
     "Why does that ashtray tell only me of its sadness and defeat? Why am I the confessor of the door latch in its misery? Why am I the only one who thinks that by opening the refrigerator I shall come to a world exactly like the one I knew twenty years ago?
     "I try to calm myself by telling myself that people cannot have so little interest in these signs.
     "In a while, when I'm asleep, I too shall become part of a story."

(Orhan Pamuk, from Other Colors: Essays and a Story)

John Cowper Powys Championship Page - Post #2 - "Our rulers at the present day, with their machines and their preachers, are all occupied in putting into our heads the preposterous notion that activity rather than contemplation is the object of life."

2011-08-23T13:08:00.000-07:00

Our rulers at the present day, with their machines and their preachers, are all occupied in putting into our heads the preposterous notion that activity rather than contemplation is the object of life.

(John Cowper Powys)

To philosophize is not to read philosophy; it is to feel philosophy. The raw spikes and jagged edges, the sour-tasting dust and wind-blown debris of superficial real life have to be deliberately comprehended, or at least evaded, before the more secret rhythms, the more recondite patterns of Nature, her humours, her tragedies, her poetry take shape in the mind.

(John Cowper Powys)

Photo Credits:
Photos #1 and #2--Images suggested by the novel Rodmoor, by John Cowper Powys, thanks to Bruno Gaultier, Systar du Systeme a L'Etoile
Photo #3--"A Welsh Village" thanks to Pr Mark Henderson

Orhan Pamuk says...#2

2011-08-19T09:15:00.000-07:00

Orhan Pamuk says...

"While one corner of my mind is busy creating fictional people, speaking and acting like my heroes, and generally trying to inhabit another person's skin, a different corner of my mind is carefully assessing the novel as a whole--surveying the overall composition, gauging how the reader will read, interpreting the narrative and the actors, and trying to predict the effect of my sentences. The more the novelist succeeds in simultaneously being both naive and sentimental, the better he writes."

John Cowper Powys Championship Page on The Long Habit of Living

2011-08-16T09:17:00.000-07:00

John Cowper Powys Championship Page on

The Long Habit of Living

I have started a new page on the blog, and it will be fed by posts about his work and his life.

Powys is a great influence on my work, and he is mentioned several times in The Long Habit of Living.

Wolf Solent was the first Powys novel that I ever read...

2011-08-15T21:58:00.001-07:00

Wolf Solent was the first Powys novel that I ever read, and I knew I was hooked on the whole philosophy and the thick oceanic love of literature and language, his literature and his language. It propelled an already steaming and obliterating love of books, more intravenous than genetics and more self-consuming than the sun.

WOLF SOLENT is a protean, inexhaustible, exhilarating book."

— George Gurley, The Kansas City Star

Wolf Solent is the first of the great novels of John Cowper Powys and caused quite a stir when it debuted in 1929, garnering praise from many of the top writers of the day including Conrad Aiken and Theodore Dreiser; Angus Wilson, Margaret Drabble, Iris Murdoch and Simon Heffer are among the faithful.

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973)
American novelist and poet,
his work includes poetry, short stories,
novels, & an autobiography

Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945)
American novelist and journalist

"The only book in the English language to rival Tolstoy."

— George Steiner

"I particularly admire John Cowper Powys.

I particularly like Wolf Solent,

A Glastonbury Romance, and Weymouth Sands."

--Iris Murdoch

This novel, says writer Lawrence Millman, "...concerns an extremely introverted man, Wolf Solent, and his courtship of two very different women. The supporting cast includes a lecherous sausage-maker, a peddler of antiquarian pornography, a homosexual clergyman, a voyeuristic country squire, a teenage boy who kisses trees, and a mad poet. Here, I thought, is God's weird plenty. "*

(*) Lawrence Millman is an Arctic explorer as well as a writer.

Here is the paragraph that caught me 30 years ago--

"He recalled the figure of a man he had seen on the steps outside Waterloo Station. The inert despair upon the face that this figure had turned towards him came between him now and a hillside covered with budding beeches. The face was repeated many times among those great curving massess of emerald-clear foliage. It was an English face; and it was also a Chinese face, a Russian face, and Indian face. It had the variableness of that Protean wine of the priestess Bacbuc. It was just the face of a man, of a mortal man against whom Providence had grown as malignant as a mad dog. And the woe upon the face was of such a character that Wolf knew at once that no conceivable social readjustments or ameliorative revolutions could ever atone for it--could ever make up for the simple irrmediable fact that it had been as it had been!" (From Wolf Solent, Chapter One "The Face on the Waterloo Steps")

"A stupendous and rather glorious book...as beautiful and strange as an electric storm."

— V. S. Pritchett

"The Wessex novels of John Cowper Powys: Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands, and Maiden Castle, must rank as four of the greatest ever to be written in our language."

-- A.N. Wilson

"It brings to mind the...romantic ferment of the film 'Les Enfants du Paradis'

or...one of the works of J.M.W. Turner."

— Anthony Bailey, The Observer

The next book was Weymouth Sands. Some of my favorite and unforgettable literary characters can be found in this book. This was and still is an extraordinary experience. Characters such as Adam "Jobber" Skald, Magnus Muir, Perdita Wane, Mr. Trot, Miss Guppy, Larry Zed, and let's not forget Dog Cattistock and Sylvanus Cobbold. I love this book and can't recommend it more strongly than flying over the most populated sites of the world and dropping pamphlets encouraging the readership.

Weymouth Sands is described thus: "...the story of Jobber Skald--a large, somewhat brutish man, obsessed with the urge to kill the local magnate of the town because of the man's contempt for the workers of the local quarry--and his redeeming love for Perdita Wane, a young girl from the Channel Islands. ...an epic tale which depicts the power of Eros, the inscrutability of the universe, and the nature of madness, while highlighting Powys's deep sympathy for the variety, eccentricity, and essential loneliness of human beings."**

(**) The editors at Overlook Press.

Here are the first two paragraphs of the book:

"The sea lost nothing of the swallowing identity of its great outer mass of waters in the emphatic, individual character of each particular wave. Each wave, as it rolled in upon the high-pebbled beach, was an epitome of the whole body of the sea, and carried with it all the vast mysterious quality of the earth's ancient antagonist.
Such at any rate was the impression that Magnus Muir--tutor in Latin to backward boys--received from the waves on Weymouth Beach as in the early twighlight of a dark January afternoon, having dismissed his last pupil for the day and hurriedly crossed the road and the esplanade, he stood on the wet pebbles and surveyed the turbulent expanse of water."

(From Weymouth Sands, Chapter One "Magnus Muir")

There is an outstanding website with beautiful and romantic photographs of the Weymouth Sands that Powys wrote about. I draw your attention to
A Visit to the Weymouth Sands of John Cowper Powys. It is so well-done, that those out there who have read the book will appreciate it significantly.

The following is from the chapter entitled "Hell's Museum":

"And all this while, like an evil blood-clot upon his brain, the thought kept coming back to him of the vivisection he felt sure went on in one of those buildings of iron and glass and pale brick, where Dr. Brush studied pathology among the inmates of Hell's Museum, and he suddenly began telling himself a story about the spirits of the old tribes who had raised this huge earth-fortress, and how the captive souls from the Brush Home might at least in the liberation of sleep come flocking out through the night to Maiden Castle and be there protected and safe, along with a great ghostly pack of couching, whimpering, fawning, cringing, torture-released dogs, all crowding close behind theses phantom-warriors, as wave after wave of their enemies poured up the slope, trying in vain to repossess themselves of them."

"An intricate, provocative, and living example of the novel which takes people as it finds them.... The cool, calm impersonality of Weymouth Sands, and the author's all but diabolical power to peer beneath the surface, combine to make it a book of moment."

— The New York Times

To encounter Powys is to arrive at the very fount of creation.--Henry Miller

2011-08-15T21:58:00.000-07:00

"To encounter Powys is to arrive at the very fount of creation."

(Henry Miller)

John Cowper Powys (1872-1963)

“...a cross between an aged werewolf and a puzzled child.”

(Margaret Drabble)

"A genius – a fearless writer, who writes with reckless passion."

(Margaret Drabble)

John Cowper Powys was a prolific novelist, essayist, letter writer, poet and philosopher, and a writer of enormous scope, complexity, profundity and humour.

A powerful orator, he spent over 30 years as an itinerant lecturer in the U.S., during which time he wrote his first four novels. In 1930, he retired to upstate New York and turned to full-time writing: it was here that he produced such masterpieces as his Autobiography, A Glastonbury Romance and Weymouth Sands.

He returned to Great Britain in 1934, settling in North Wales in 1935, where he wrote the historical novels Owen Glendower and Porius, the critical studies of Rabelais and Dostoevsky, and The Brazen Head.

Other notable novels are Wolf Solent and Maiden Castle: ...rich in characterization, psychological analysis, and evocation of place.

George Steiner once claimed that Powys was the only twentieth-century English writer on a par with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

Margaret Drabble, the distinguished English novelist, believes, “we need to pay attention to this man.” The world of his novels, she says, is “densely peopled, thickly forested, mountainous, erudite, strangely self-sufficient. This country is less visited than Tolkien’s, but it is as compelling, and it has more air.”

(All above text courtesy of the Official Website of The Powys Society)

(From noted writer Lawrence Millman): "What struck me when I reread Wolf Solent recently was not its weirdness but its compassion for the down-and-out, the aberrant, and the misbegotten. What also struck me was its casual attitude toward polymorphous sex. 'Natural or unnatural,' one of the characters says, 'it's nature. It's mortal man's one great solace before he's annihilated.' I can't imagine anyone else of Powys's generation writing those words. Certainly not D. H. Lawrence, who compared with Powys was a reactionary about matters of the flesh."

Orhan Pamuk says...

2011-08-01T21:01:00.000-07:00

"A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words." (Orhan Pamuk)

"He can write poems, plays, or novels, as I do. All these differences come after the crucial task of sitting down at the table and patiently turning inwards. To write is to turn this inward gaze into words, to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy." (Orhan Pamuk)

One of my new "pages" on this blog is devoted to the deep admiration and respect I have for the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. His work enlightens, empowers, and entertains; and as a great man once said to me, "you can't get much better than that." The page is titled simply, "Orhan Pamuk says..."

New short story added to blog

2011-07-09T10:33:00.000-07:00

I just added a new short story to my blog, if anyone's interested.

It's called, "Dear Lou, Please Kill the Cats."

So, enjoy.

Page 306: "My lessons on the Provencals were never-ending."

2011-06-20T15:16:00.000-07:00

From page 306 of the book: My lessons on the Provençals were never-ending. I remembered our second dinner with Ebert, where he'd explained that Alphonse Daudet was one of many great Frenchmen to have come from this region, and like many of those great Frenchmen he had referred to his birthplace, a land dominated by the industrial and wealthy North, as if it were a joke. Daudet later explained, and one was supposed to believe it, that his mockery was merely a ruse for his true love of the South.

Young Alphonse Daudet

cover of "Letters from My Mill"

Another edition of "Letters from My [Wind]Mill"

Alphonse Daudet

The Windmill

Plaque with Daudet quote which explains that, in this corner of the world, it was for him a fatherland where one could find beings or places in all of his books. I know such a reverence. I have four such corners: Connecticut, Illinois, Queens NY, and Arlington, VA.

Page 326 "Duncan is in his grave"

2011-06-20T14:49:00.000-07:00

From page 326 of the book: I took de Chambrun's diary out of the envelope.... The following pages mentioned Lincoln reciting a passage from MacBeth, act three, scene four; I could only remember a small bit of it: "Duncan is in his grave; After life's fitful fever he sleeps well; ...nothing can touch him further."

Above: Three witches, from a stage production of "Macbeth"; Orson Welles as Macbeth; play edition cover.

Better be with the dead,
Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace,
Than on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy. Duncan is in his grave;
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can touch him further.

(Macbeth, Act III, Sc. 4)

Page 366 "Still a sacrifice. Still a misunderstood man."

2011-06-18T13:49:00.000-07:00

From page 366 of the book: "You know, Walt," Owen expelled, resting his head against the back of the seat, turning to me at selected intervals between looking at the roof or out into the winter gloom. "After the Civil War was over, James Longstreet realized that there was no way to make the postwar South work unless somebody gave of themselves, to work within the system, to reconstruct the South, you know. When he became a Republican, and don't forget now the Republican Party was the party of the North, he'd offered himself as that sacrifice to the Cause. He sacrificed himself, going against his Southern brethren because he believed that getting placed into key Republican positions would actually help to rebuild the burned out and bombed out homes and cities of Dixie. He felt he could help the South by working to reunite it with the North in spirit. They hated him for it. They crucified him for it! They fucking rewrote history for it. Still a sacrifice. Still a misunderstood man."

James Longstreet

Page 318 "...and plucked from a small pile of books...Malraux's History of France"

2011-06-18T11:34:00.000-07:00

From page 318 of the book: He's reading Ebert's book, I thought, and I slumped onto my bed, and plucked from a small pile of books on my window sill Malraux's History of France. My eyes glued themselves to a chapter on Louis XIV, and how "The Monarchy's Greatness Prepared the Way for Its Downfall," and Owen's eyes were glued to a small section of Ebert's The Journal of Josef S.
Note: In this excerpt, there is a typo. It is not Andre Malraux's History of France, but A History of France by Andre Maurois, published in 1948. Sometimes the typist in me segments from the writer. I apologize for the mistake. --M.Z.

"If you create an act, you create a habit. If you create a habit, you create a character. If you create a character, you create a destiny.” [A.M.]

Andre Maurois

Sir Thomas Browne - from whose work I got the title of the novel

2011-06-13T15:32:00.000-07:00

Sir Thomas Browne
(From whose work the title of my book comes.)

Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) was an English author of varied works which reveal his wide learning in diverse fields including medicine, religion, science and the esoteric. Browne's writings display a deep curiosity towards the natural world, influenced by the scientific revolution of Baconian enquiry, while his Christian faith exuded tolerance and goodwill towards humanity in an often intolerant era. A consummate literary craftsman, Browne's works are permeated by frequent reference to Classical and Biblical sources and to his own highly idiosyncratic personality. His literary style varies according to genre resulting in a rich, unusual prose that ranges from rough notebook observations to the highest baroque eloquence. Although he was described as suffering from melancholia, Browne's writings are also characterised by wit and subtle humour. (Text courtesy of Wikipedia)

Browne's Hydriotaphia
(photo courtesy of Kevin Faulkner)

For further reading, I recommend this site: Aquarium of Vulcan

The works of Sir Thomas Browne have had and continue to have a profound impact on my writing and on my thinking. As we all know, it is not uncommon for writers to title their works from a sentence or a phrase or a whisper from the great works of literature. Several writers have given their books titles from the texts of Sir Thomas Browne, as I have.

Page 386 "the Dead Sea was more active than any sparse communication we might have had"

2011-06-13T15:09:00.000-07:00

From page 386 of the book: I could no longer stand the gulf that ran between Owen and myself, I began to look for him. One could say the Dea Sea was more active than any sparse communication we might have had...

[Three perspectives of the Dead Sea.]

Discovery site of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Page 403 "a story about John Adams and Thomas Jefferson"

2011-06-13T14:58:00.000-07:00

From page 403 of the book: "You know," I said, “you once told me a story about John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, that Jefferson kept waiting for Adams to die so that he could die in peace as well, knowing Adams wouldn't have to live alone in the world without him. And that Adams felt the same way about Jefferson. But when you told me they died on the same day you could've knocked me over with a feather.
"I think Ebert and Revenant are the same kind of men," I decided. "Like Adams was to Jefferson, and Jefferson to Adams."

John Adams, Thomas Jefferson

John Adams (one of my favorite Americans)

Illustration of the death of John Adams

Thomas Jefferson

Page 402 "...hearken to the Sirens"

2011-06-13T14:49:00.000-07:00

From page 402 of the book: He began to pour the remainder of the dirt from his hand and then continued: "'If therefore thou do but hearken to the Sirens, thou wilt be enamored;..."

(In Greek mythology, the Sirens were three dangerous bird-women, portrayed as seductresses who lured nearby sailors with their enchanting music and voices to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their island.) (Text courtesy of Wikipedia)

The Bishop quotes from John Lyly [there a a few variations on the spelling of his name].

Page 398 "Lucian's body appeared on the doormat of the 115th Precinct"

2011-06-08T07:36:00.000-07:00

From page 398 of the book: Lucian's body appeared on the doormat of the 115th Precinct in Jackson Heights, Queens, at four o'clock in the morning on New Year's Day. It was a mystery to the police as to who brought him. He was covered with numerous bruises and cuts all over his face, neck, arms, hands, and legs. His clothes were torn and saturated with dirt, blood, and grease. It was a further mystery as to how his body was dumped in front of a police station without anyone seeing the delivery. The desk sergeant was as angry as he was embarrassed, or he was angry because he was embarrassed, having been caught off guard with the results of an unrestrained assault placed on his doorstep under the noses of his entire staff. He screamed for God to save him from the wrath of his captain, as he ordered Lucian to be taken to Elmhurst Hospital and admitted without delay.

The 115th Precinct, Jackson Heights, Queens, New York

Images of Jackson Heights, where I spent some of the happiest years of my life: (clockwise from top left): the subway stop at Roosevelt Ave; a typical J.H. street; under the elevated Number 7 train; a neighborhood; again under the elevated; and Elmhurst Hospital.

Page 390 "...while he drove the back streets of Flushing, around Kissena Park..."

2011-06-08T07:21:00.000-07:00

From page 390 of the book: In a clever, circumspect style, Sylvester had begun to ask questions about his cousin while he drove the back streets of Flushing, around Kissena Park, past Queens College, toward Grand Central Parkway. Maneuvering us away from the Long Island Expressway, due to an accident that had backed up traffic for a mile, he had kept at me with questions and accusations.
"Sylvester," I began, "I'm sorry you weren't told."
"Sorry! Being sorry is for assholes. I thought we didn't keep secrets."
"We don't," I said.
"Well?"
I looked at my driver, at his six-foot-two presence with a gentle face, mad eyes, and wet, curly black hair.
"You're right," I said. "Sorry. There haven't been secrets between us, but this time it was different."
"I don't think so," he bit his nails, keeping his eyes on the road ahead of us.
"Let me explain," I offered.

A view of Queens College

Aerial view of the Queens College campus

...past Queens College, toward Grand Central Parkway. Maneuvering us away from the Long Island Expressway,...

Page 392 "...likening him to Gilles de Rais"

2011-05-25T09:09:00.000-07:00

I had given him Lucian's obvious virtues, likening him to Gilles de Rais or to any other child-molesting, drunken, abusive, criminal mentality developed over six centuries within the Hope of Hell.

A recreation of the Bluebeard story which follows a French Army captain, executed in Brittany in 1440. The list of his crimes include witchcraft, heresy, sacrilege, sorcery, the evocations of demons and the practice of unnatural crime against children, ending with their murder for his delight. (Text courtesy of Amazon.com)

Impression of Gilles de Rais from a Romanian website.

Gilles de Rais: Gilles de Montmorency-Laval, baron de Rais (1404–1440). A Breton knight, a leader in the French army, a companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc. He is best known as a prolific serial killer of children. (Text courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Page 376 "My name's Emmanuel."

2011-05-24T21:26:00.000-07:00

Clockwise from top left: Devil's Island cells; inmates of Devil's Island; another view of the cells; Devil's Island from the air; the three Isles du Salut, off the coast of French Guiana [i.e., Devil's Island is one of the three Isles du Salut]; a book on Captain Dreyfus, one of the more "celebrated" Devil's Island inmates; the movie poster for "Papillon" from the book by Henri Charriere (1906-1973). I read Charriere's book when I was 16, back in 1971, at the recommendation of our neighbor (a close friend of my father's youngest sister). It made a robust impression on me. It is not a book for the squeamish, or the faint of heart. And because I liked it so much, he gave me "Portnoy's Complaint" to carry on.

From page 376 of the book: “Who are you?” Revenant stood close to him, taking in the dark skin, the black tousled hair, unshaven face, and broken teeth. His clothes were made of a hearty fabric from a foreign mill. His bare feet revealed the infestation of sand fleas having burrowed into his toenails.
“My name’s Emmanuel.”
“And what are you doing here?”
“I’m from the Isles du Salut.”
“Yes, I thought I could smell the prison steps on you,” Revenant stared.
Emmanuel smiled. “You’ve found my dinner I see.”
“I found a young girl named Oyami. Did you kill her?”
The man from Devil’s Island looked up into Revenant’s eyes and nodded.

Page 375 "I honestly felt the presence of God with every whiff of nectar..."

2011-05-24T21:06:00.000-07:00

Top: Astrocaryum palm; bottom: awarra and a detail drawing of one of the stingers from the Astrocaryum

From page 375 of the book: “My limbs were shaking,” he explained, “since I was so stupid as to walk out into the darkness unassisted. I had no gun. Foolish man, I know but I honestly felt the presence of God with every whiff of nectar from the red blooms of the manil tree; I felt his presence in the poisonous spines of the Astrocaryum palm and the Bactris. You rub up against them and you’re as good as a dead man because of their stingers.”

Page 374 "...along the Approuague River..."

2011-05-24T20:56:00.000-07:00

Fishing on the Approuague River.

From page 374 of the book: In remote villages along the Approuague River, he shared the communal lands with an unbounded natural museum of rare and exotic birds, unusual plants, brilliant colored amphibians, and bizarre insect species, as well as with mountain lions, squirrel monkeys, giant otters, tapirs, and white-tail deer.

The Approuague River

[Photos Copyright by Robert Hardin]

Page 374 "Yes, I was there, in French Guiana, decades ago."

2011-05-24T20:46:00.000-07:00

Table mountains of the northern part of South America; "they called them Tepuis"

Another view of the tepuis

The forest canopy of French Guiana

From page 374 of the book: "Yes, I was there, in French Guiana, decades ago.”
“You must’ve pissed somebody off to get sent there.”
“No, no, I requested it, after Vietnam. But, Christ! The sun there was like a razor blade against my skin. I lived between the river forests and the table mountains, they called them the Tepuis, with my very simple people, the Javanese, the Creole French, and the Arawak Indians, and all kinds of strange creatures.”

"...with my very simple people, ...the Arawak Indians,..."

"...and all kinds of strange creatures.”

Top: two views of a tapir; bottom: squirrel monkeys

Page 372 "...the freezing glimpse into the nameless Eternal."

2011-05-24T20:30:00.000-07:00

Caravaggio's "Salome with the Head of John the Baptist" (1607)

From page 372 of the book: Owen was exhausted by the time he finished his confession, like the executioner who delivered the Baptist's head to Salomé. Owen carried the broken tablets, the freezing glimpse into the nameless Eternal.

Jean Benner's "Salome" (1899)

Pierre Bonnaud's "Salome" (1865)

Movie poster for Al Pacino's film "Wilde Salome" (2011)

Caravaggio, "Salome with the Head of John the Baptist" (1609)

Page 357 "the fish and the symbol of Saint Peter blending together around his face."

2011-05-15T13:26:00.000-07:00

From page 357 of the book: I felt in my blood the lance of betrayal that he imagined had piked him. I saw the streamers flowing from the lance, characters of the fish and the symbol of Saint Peter blending together around his face.

Painting of St. Peter's crucifixion

A composite I made of a lance piercing the symbol of St. Peter, the Vatican

[In ecclesiastical heraldry, the Papal coat of arms contain the keys of the office of St. Peter. The Keys of Heaven were, according to Christian tradition, received by Saint Peter from Jesus, marking Peter's ability to take binding actions.[1] Thus, the Keys are seen as a symbol of Papal authority still to this day. "Behold he [Peter] received the keys of the kingdom of heaven, the power of binding and loosing is committed to him, the care of the whole Church and its government is given to him [cura ei totius Ecclesiae et principatus committitur]

Page 346 "Shanzenbach suddenly began to sing 'The Marseillaise.'"

2011-05-15T12:53:00.000-07:00

From page 346 of the book: Shanzenbach suddenly began to sing "The Marseillaise," the French national anthem, with Owen providing accompaniment.
    "How I love that song," cried Revenant. "Tell the Good Walter about 'The Marseillaise.'"
    "I don't want to give a history lesson," said Ebert. "I'm half drunk."
    "You know, Walter," began Revenant, "it was composed in 1792, at the beginning of the Revolutionary Wars. That little man, Napoleon, he didn't like it. Screw him."

David's portrait of Napolean in 1792

http://www.alldownloadlinks.com/french-napoleonic-infantry-tactics-1792-1815-elite_225241.html

Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle, composer of The Marseillaise

Posters for Jean Renoir's 1938 film.

Page 343-344 "The fools.... I drank because it tasted good."

2011-05-15T12:23:00.000-07:00

Mourvedre grapes

Vineyard of Mourvedre grapes. The Mourvèdre grape produces tannic wines that can be high in alcohol, and is most successful in Rhone-style blends, with a particular affinity for Grenache, softening it and giving it structure. It often has a wild, gamey or earthy flavour, with soft red fruit flavours. (Text courtesy of Wikipedia)

Ambrose Dudley painting of Phocean Greeks defeating Cathaginians

Domaine Bandol

Greek plate depicting...yes, the serving of wine

From pages 343-344 of the book: "I walked into a café on the rue September Fourth," he continued. "I sat down and ordered a bottle of wine. Romassan. I drank the entire bottle and ordered another. When I'd begun my third bottle, I could hear voices at a table in the corner. Men were watching me. They felt sorry for me. They said, Look, there's Ebert, drowning his sorrows in wine because his boy is dead. They said, Look, Ebert will drink away his pain. Notre frère boirá les afflictions du monde.
"But they were wrong," he said. "The fools. I was drinking because the wine was superb. The vintage was Mourvèdre. Its vines were carried over by the Phocean Greeks five centuries before Christ, you know. La balance! L'harmonie! La bouquet! All were...uplifting. I drank because it tasted good!"

Page 344 "They called him 'Our Man in Havana."

2011-05-15T12:09:00.000-07:00

From page 344 of the book: Regretfully, I listened as Owen joined them, dealing the cards, winning pot after pot of chips, relating episodes of his childhood and his adolescence, especially those incidents concerning the discovery of sex and the failure of love. They were full of disappointment and unrealized expectations. He talked of injured cousins, divorced aunts, infant deaths, business failures, heart attacks, teenage abortions, and friends' cancer. The old men hooted and howled and begged him for more. They called him 'General.' They called him 'Professor.' They called him 'Our Man in Havana.' Whistles by the old priest nearly shocked me to sobriety. Revenant grasped Owen's hands and said to him:
"Do your best, my friend. We ask only that you do your best. Don't be afraid."

Clockwise from top left: Cover for the novel "Our Man in Havana" by Graham Greene; Graham Greene, 1904-1991, English author, playwright and literary critic; Book cover photo of Greene's "A Life in Letters"; Alec Guiness as James Wormold in the movie version; movie poster; scene from the movie with Alec Guiness and Ernie Kovacs (Captain Segura).

The black & white film version of this book, which I actually just saw a couple days ago, is incredible. Produced & Directed by the great Carol Reed (if you don't recall Reed, he did "The Third Man"), its comedy is brilliantly entwined with its suspense, all fixed against the shadows and strange sources of light of Reed's view of pre-Reveolutionary Cuba, although the movie was filmed just after Castro overthrew the government of the previous dictator. I highly recommend this film. It's available from Netflix. And one more thing, Ernie Kovacs does a stupendous job, as does Noel Coward.

Page 337 "My God, I thought, this man's blood was so toxic from medicine, how could he hope to live from the cure?"

2011-05-08T11:17:00.000-07:00

From page 337 of the book: Amid the disarray of glasses were drug vials, some empty, some still with pills in them. I read the labels and afterward identified them with Dr. Fanon's help. There were little bottles of demerol, to squelch his pain; diethylstilbestrol, an estrogen agent, to combat the production of testosterone; fluorouracil, an antimetabolite that directly fought the cancer; as well as vincristine, a mitotic inhibitor, which blocked the DNA assemblage within the cancerous cells. My God, I thought, this man's blood was so toxic from medicine, how could he hope to live from the cure? Another cytotoxic drug huddled in the background: medroxyprogesterone acetate. It was to act as an assassin of the cancer. A large bottle of vitamin C stood next to the vincristine.

The antimetabolite Flucytosine was originally developed in the 1950's as a potential antineoplastic agent. Although ineffective against tumors it was later found to have antifungal activity. This small molecule is transported into susceptible fungal cells by a specific enzyme cytosine permease and converted in the cytoplasm by cytosine deaminase to 5-fluorouracil (5-FU)- a pyrimidine anti-metabolite used as chemotherapy for many types of colorectal cancer.

An antimetabolite drip (chemotherapy)

A dividing cancer cell

A comparison of cell division