0926

September 26, 2022

In bed @9:30, up at 5:40, 5 or 6 pss, up and down all night, not very restful sleep, one glass of red.

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 Reading a long essay in The New Yorker - The Shocks and Aftershocks of The Waste Land - about the centenary of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and a review of the endless number of books written about it.   Reminds me of how I never cared for the poem though I have always liked The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, though never understanding much of either.  It seems like the writer, Anthony Lane, wanted a vehicle for showing off his great erudition in writing about and critiquing Eliot's great erudition.  Also making me think of Godard's deep pessimism and cynicism and wondering whether I'm just not sharp enough to get him, either.  There are times when I swell with gratitude for the liberal education I received in high school and in college and other times when I moan about its deficiencies, or more accurately my own failure to take advantage of all that was available.  A memory from 60 years ago:  my MU classmate and fellow NROTC midshipman and fellow Marine John Boyan, who won his Navy scholarship while serving as an enlisted Marine, sat with my group at the student union one day and, over our cups of coffee, took issue with a friend who complained about the educational opportunities at Marquette.  John asked the friend how many volumes were available to all of us across the street at the university library and what prevented any of us from taking advantage of all of them rather than playing bridge, drinking coffee and kibitzing at the Union.  Point taken.  John would become a helicopter pilot and serve a tour of duty in Vietnam, like the rest of us, which like the rest of us he thankfully survived.  I have warm memories of him and of his wife Linda from Mason City, Iowa, 90 miles north of my roots in Fort Dodge and Duncombe, Iowa.

    Back to Eliot: I read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock again tonight and enjoyed it even more than usual.  The flow and rhythm of the words are really pleasing; it's a pleasure to read it, to speak it.  It's more than 100 years old, written in 1910, and published in 1915, but it's very readable, and mostly understandable, at least for a 'modernist' poem, so many of which are utterly opaque, indecipherable.  It's depressing, bleak, grim, descriptive of alienation, inability to communicate with one another, sort of anticipating the like of Monsieur Godard and his like.  Seems a bit surprising since it was written before the Great War which I guess I tend to think of as the beginning of THE MODERN MALAISE.  What do I know?

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There is a quote from a children's book in the Eliot article that gave me pause: “Your heart is in a very wicked state. You are under the dominion of some of the worst of feelings; you are self-conceited, ungrateful, undutiful, unjust, selfish, and,” he added in a lower and more solemn tone, “even impious.”  Made me think of myself when too often my 'heart is in a very wicked state.'

I was also struck by an inscription by Eliot in a copy of The Waste Land that he gave to his second wife Valerie; "This book belongs to Valerie, and so does Thomas Stearns Eliot, her husband. He could not give her this book, for he had no copy to give her. She had wanted the book for many years. She had possessed the author for over a year when the book came. She had made his land blossom and birds to sing there." ♦  It reminded me of course of Charles Dennis Clausen and his feelings toward his second wife.💘

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I watched a 1980 interview with Jean-Luc Godard by Dick Cavett.  I didn't understand much of what he said in response to Cavett's questions any more than I understand his movies.  Cavatt's halting style of speaking and asking questions kind of gives me the creeps.

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I worked on Balustrade mixed results today.  Big win: painting the black blanket hanging over the railing.  Also pleased with toning down the ochre background with some carmine and then raw umber glazing. Not so good, to say the least: the woman's nose, her left side. green pretty much as van Dongen painted it, but I'm not van Dongen.  I'll have to live with this overnight, see what I think in the morning.

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