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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0925

September 25, 2022

 In bed at 10:30, awake around 4:30, out of bed at 5:10, 3 pss, 2 glasses of red  Waking thoughts of Aunt Monica, cousins, Scotty Cummings.  Waking back pain has returned.  56 and cloudy, high of 64 expected.

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Geri trimmed my hair last night with the new clippers after reading the instructions and going to YouTube for some more instructions.  Needs to be cut shorter, will work on it again today.  Had many admiring thoughts of her resourcefulness, her DIYism, and her willingness to try stuff where I would just throw up my hands.  Remarkable woman, a wonderful person.

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I read a long piece on eastern European author Joseph Roth, author of The Radetsky March, The Wandering Jews, and many novels  Born and raised in the shtetl of Brody, northeast of what is now Lviv, Ukraine, but once a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and of Poland, and of the Soviet Union.  Reading of Brody and the annihilation of its Jews during the Holocaust reminded me of Babi Yar, of Bransk in Poland and of Dvinsk in Latvia, Rothko's birthplace and countless other Ashkenazi towns in Eastern Europe that before the Holocaust had majority or plurality Jewish populations.  Still and always hard to even imagine the horror of it and what it revealed of the nature of humankind.

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Went to Blicks downtown to pick up some carmine paint.  They had only one brand of carmine, very surprising, but I bought it and it looks good on the Balustrade painting.  The whole Third Ward was booming at 11 o'clock on a Sunday morning.  I thought that if I were in my 20s  or maybe 30s, without children and a need for a big yard and 2-car garage, I'd find a spot in the 3rd Ward.

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The carmine paint is just right, a deep, rich hue.  Made some progress today.

0924

September 24, 2022 

In bed at 11, up at 6:30, 2 (3?) glasses of red. 52 degrees and cloudy, dark morning.  

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I asked Geri to cut my hair yesterday and she was kind enough to agree.  The hair was way too long, which I wouldn't mind if it weren't so thin and wispy, falling, blowing all over my head and face.  The haircut reminded again, though I need no reminder, of how much Geri takes care of me, and Lilly, and our home, how truly dependent I am on her, we are on her.  Without her I would be utterly unable to live in this house, or any house, on my own.  Can't get down on the floor cuz I can't get up, can't climb a ladder huzza balance, dizziness, dealing with steps a problem, especially descending, even one step.  Candidate for Bosky Dells, me and Maude Frickert😱 but so much to be thankful for, especially my wife, my O&O.

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Drove Geri to Kohl's department store at Bayshore where she picked up some electric  clippers to work some more on my hair, bless her heart.  

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Michael Reck posted a lovely remembrance of his mom this morning:

"Avatar is back in theaters and I actually want to see it again. It is a great movie, but that isn't why I want to go. As a kid movies were my escape and my Mom and Dad took me to see a lot of great movies, Star Wars(like 26 times) E.T., Superman the Movie, Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and so many more. 

As I got older I started going to the movies with my friends, dates, and girlfriends. I didn't go with my Mom or Dad as often and when did go with them it was still something special. It was nostalgic, even if the movies weren't as great.

Back when Avatar was released, I was staying with my Mom and Dad while I was recovering from my second major spinal surgery. I couldn't be at home because of some crazy circumstances and I wasn't really able to do much, I had a walker I needed to get around, I felt abandoned due to things going on with my marriage at the time, and honestly I was very depressed. My Mom's health also began to decline, she started to need oxygen more and more at the time. So things weren't great. 

We were watching the morning news and they talked about the movie and my Mom looked at me and said let's go see that. The next day we went. My Mom and I both totally loved the movie. But the best part was feeling like a kid again. Watching a movie with my Mom that was a magical film and was so awe inspiring, like the movies we saw when I was young. It was a special moment and the last time I saw a movie with my Mom in a theater. So I want to see it and just remember that moment with Mom. 

Miss you and love you Kitty Reck!!!"

I commented: "Mike, thanks so much so sharing those memories of time with your wonderful incomparable loving Mom. You warm my heart and I note, as always, you are a gifted writer.❤❤"

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More Godard monologue,  2 or 3 Things I Know About Her:

". . . since social relations are always ambiguous since my thoughts divide as much as unite, and my words unite by what they express and isolate by what they omit since a wide gulf separates my subjective certainty of myself from the objective truth others have of me, since I constantly end up guilty, even though I feel innocent, since every event changes my daily life, since I always fail to communicate, to understand, to love and be loved, and every failure deepens my solitude, since . . . I cannot escape the objectivity crushing me nor the subjectivity expelling me since I cannot rise to a state of being nor collapse into nothingness, I have to listen, more than ever I have to look around me at the world, my fellow creature, my brother."

Closing lines of the film:  "I listen to commercials on my transistor.  Thanks to ESSO, I serenely take the road to dreams and forget all else.  I forget Hiroshima and Auschwitz.  I forget Budapest.  I forget Vietnam and minimum wages.  I forget the housing crisis.  I forget the famine in India.  I've forgotten it all, except that since it takes me back to zero, I have to start over from there. (Visual: attractive young man and woman embracing behind a foreground of "Hollywood chewing gum.  The withdrawing camera shot shows an assortment of commercially available cleaning products and other consumer goods.)

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Worked on "Woman at the Balustrade" this afternoon.  Still iffy.  Almost got in big trouble with a burnt sienna glaze on her face.

0923

September 23, 2022

 In bed at 9, awake at 2:30, and out of bed at 2:55. 3 pss, no vino.   Left hip 'gave out' on me once during the day, again tonight.  Sharp pain, then 'giving out', then went away.  Lilly sleeping on the TV room floor at 3, moved to the living room when I came in.  41 degrees outside.  Could almost put a log on in the fireplace, but the cool temp won't last long enough to ensure a good draft. A high of 64 is expected.

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Started watching another Godard film last night - Vivre sa vie - 1962, starring his then muse, future wife, and heartbreaker Anna Karina.  The story and film are reminiscent of Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box, with Brooks' bobbed haircut, life as a prostitute, and violent death.  At 4 this morning, tuned back into Vivre, though tempted to kiss it off, wondering if I had seen it years ago but in any event finding Godard's unrelenting attention on nasty (wrong word, sordid?) characters depressing.  Maybe that was his point.  The film has Godard's trademark philosophical discussion between the heroine/protagonist and a real philosopher, just encountered in a cafe: Nana: Why must one always talk? I think one should often just keep quiet, and live in silence. The more one talks, the less the words mean.  Philosophe: It's always struck me, the fact we can't live without speaking.  Nana: Words should express just what one wants to say.  Do they betray us?  Philosophe: Yes, but we betray them too. . . . I believe, one learns to speak well only when one has renounced life for a while. . . there's a kind of ascetic rule that stops one from speaking well until one sees life with detachment  And so on, very philosophical, very French, very focused on language and meaning and communication between humans, hints of deconstructionism and Jacques Derrida.  Direct references to Kant, Hegel, and Leibnitz.  Just what we would expect from a streetwalking prostitute schmoozing with a stranger in a coffee shop.😎  The story has a grisly ending for Nana, just as for Lulu in Pandora's Box.  Godard's naming of the protagonist "Nana"seems a pretty clear reference to Emile Zola's novel Nana, in which the protagonist, also a prostitute, also dies a grisly death.

    How much Godard can I take?  Why am I so repulsed by his films, at least the ones I have seen?  His view of human nature is bleak, for sure, but so are those of Thomas Hobbes, H. L. Mencken, Reinhold Niebuhr, and so many, many others.  Is my view all that different?  Is it 'just' that he seems to offer no 'redeeming social/human value's our lives, to our species, no goodness, no love, no altruism, no heroes and no saints?  As I watch these films I keep in mind that he had lived and grown up in Europe through World War II and its grim aftermath.  He was born in non-combatant Switzerland in 1930 and lived there throughout the war but considered himself 'Franco-Swiss', with a foot in each country.  Neither the French government at Vichy nor les francais covered themselves with a lot of honor during the war, witness Ophuls' "The Sorrow and the Pity." Plus, it wasn't only the Axis powers who behaved with abundant cruelty during the war, but also the Allies, witness the terror bombing of Dresden, Tokyo, and other cities.  And of course the Grand Finale: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  How could one have a benign opinion of the human race in the face of such evidence of profound cruelty, stupidity, etc.   How can it be any different now?  But who wants to be fed a steady diet of this and think of it as what - entertainment?  

    All these films call to mind the question of what the function of art is, first in terms of the artist, secondly, in terms of the - what is the right word?- consumer, enjoyer, viewer, reader, listener?  I think of 'artists' simply as people who make something that requires thinking and some kind of design choice, a 5 year old building a sand castle is an artist, as is an 80-year-old amateur painter crudely painting knockoffs of favorite paintings done by more gifted artists, or a meal preparer designing a salad with many ingredients.  The artist's purpose in doing her art may be necessity, or pecuniary, or pleasure, or some need for self-expression, or, perhaps, propaganda to control or manipulate the thoughts of others, or whatever.  It seems more complicated to consider the purpose of art in terms of the consumer.  To learn, to be entertained, to be soothed, to be excited, even to be told how to think about something, how to feel about something as with religious art and some social art - Nazi and Soviet art for example.  So what doeone  expect to get from watching Godard's 1960s New Wave films?  I don't know.  What was he 'getting off his chest' in making them?  What are we 'getting on our chest' by watching them?

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    Early morning TV features dramatic scenes out of Russia (St. Petersburg, Moscow) of men being drafted and loaded onto buses, and men fleeing to avoid service.  What if they gave a war and nobody came?  What if we had all fled to Canada during the Vietnam catastrophe?  The Good Old Days: campus demonstrations, Pentagon and Dow Chemical, Monsanto protests over napalm & Agent Orange, SDS and The Weathermen, America Love It or Leave It, . . . So it went with me as a perplexed, confused, embarrassed, conflicted, ashamed, and guilty observer.  Not that I was 'best' at anything, but inevitably mindful of Yeats' The Second Coming: "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold . . .The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

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    Did some work on Woman at the Balustrade.  Pretty iffy.

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    Drove Peter to football practice at 3 this afternoon.  It's only a 10-minute drive from his home to Nicolet but I enjoy the opportunity to spend time and chat with him.

0922

September 22, 2022

Up late last night, watching all of Lawrence O'Donnell, sharing his schadenfreude over Trump's legal setbacks in the 11th Circuit and in New York State with Letitia James' $250,000,000 civil suit against him for fraud.  Got up at 7:30.  Mistakenly said yesterday was Autumnal Equinox; it's today.  Geri awakened at 7:40 by a phone call from David Hobbs; her car is ready.

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This morning's NYT carries a story headlined "Ukrainian Officials in Liberated Towns Are Grappling With the Issue of Identifying People They Believe Helped the Enemy."  It calls to mind Marcel Ophuls' 4 hour 1969 documentary streaming on OVID "The Sorrow and the Pity" about France's and the French people's collaboration with the Nazis during the Occupation and about those active in the Resistance.  The issue of how to behave while living under armed occupation by a powerful nation is not a simple one.  The occupying forces are in a very real sense 'the enemy,' but they are also the real government, for better or worse.  Some people treat the occupiers as evil, while others seek a modus vivendi because, as in John Mellencamp's 'Jack and Diane," oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone.  Resistance may be noble, but perhaps it is also stupid, and self-defeating in terms of making the best of a bad situation.  One thing we know: history is written by the winners.  If the Russians were to prevail in eastern and southern Ukraine, the 'collaborators' will be treated as heroes, practical people; if Ukraine ousts the Russians, 'collaborators' are 'traitors.'

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Much talk on the news shows last night and today about the 11th Circuit smackdown of Judge Cannon's special master decision giving Donald Trump about everything he asked for.  But it's a bit like the 'collaborator' issue.  To Trump worshippers, Cannon is a hero.  To the rest of us, a disgrace to the robes she wears.  Ultimately, winners write the history.

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I have a 24" X 30" canvas downstairs waiting to be painted.  I'm going to try to do a knockoff of Kees van Donjon's 'Woman at the Balustrade.'  May be more than I can handle.

0921

September 21, 2022

 In bed before 10, awake at 3:40, out of bed before 4, und. pss, one cognac.

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8:40 tonight marks the arrival of the autumnal equinox.  Andy told me yesterday that folklore has it that one can balance an egg upright on this night due to the earth's magnetic field and axis tilt.  In any case, as the rising sun moves steadily south over Lake Michigan, the sunlight streaming through the window in our east-facing family room moves steadily north, moving from Jimmy's glider chair across the long expanse of the sofa, ending on the face of the fireplace. "As sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our life.' 

     One benefit of all the car frustrations we've been enduring recently is that I've had a lot of great conversations with Andy about his family, Life, work, legal education, and the state of the world.  His views are always interesting to me and have been since he was a tyke.  Last night he was coaching Drew's flag-football team since the originally-designated coach somehow took a powder.  Today he leaves work early to be home when the dishwasher installation guy gets there.  After that, we're hoping that the Lexus is repaired and that Andy can pick it up and drive it safely.  I'm a bit fearful that the mechanic's substitute customized solution won't work.  Maybe I'm just down on auto repair operators right now, no surprise. . . . . Andy called @ 11:45, Lexus ready.  Picked me up to drop him off at Andrew Toyota.  Hallelujah.

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The morning news is distressing: Putin has mobilized the reserves.  It calls to mind my experience after I resigned my regular commission in the Marines and was on 'standby reserve' (or whatever it was called) for 2 years, i.e., fresh from active service, ready to slide right into active duty, and subject to recall at any time.  Those 2 years coincided with my 1st and 2nd year of law school, and a very few of my classmates thought it was humorous to misinform me, as President Johnson kept increasing the number of troops in Vietnam, that he had 'called up the reserves.'  To me, of course, it was as funny as a broken crutch or a heart attack.  Neither Johnson nor Nixon ever did activate the reserves for service in Vietnam, probably out of fear that there would be rioting in the streets and massive opposition, especially after 1968.  One wonders how what Putin is calling a 'partial mobilization' will be received by the Russian populace.

    The mobilization news also increases concern that Putin and his plodding military will resort to the use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical or other unconventional weapons, or some combination thereof.  [“To those who allow themselves such statements about Russia, I want to remind you that our country also has various means of destruction, and some components are more modern than those of the NATO countries,” Putin said.]  The thought of Putin and his military being backed into a corner is troubling, to say the least.  In his speech announcing the call-up of 300,000 reserve troops, he also again uttered a nor-so-veiled threat of using nuclear weapons.  His almost mystical belief in Mother Russia, the Russian Empire, Russkiy Mir, egged on by Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church, makes the Ukraine 'special military operation' almost a holy war, a crusade, in the mind of hyper-nationalist Putin.  If possible, holy wars are even more ruthless, less inhibited than 'ordinary wars'.  All's fair, sanctioned, and even demanded by God.

    By happenstance, I was listening to Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony, the Pathetique, in my AirPods as I read the news out of Russia.  Seemed appropriate, especially the 4th movement, the adagio lamentoso.  My very first classical record purchase as a teenager was Tchaikovsky's 6th, a cheapie at our local National Foodstore.

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    Robin Givhan is my favorite writer at the WaPo.  Her piece this morning is on King Charles III, including this: "The new king is the embodiment of so many traditions and injustices that Western culture is struggling to come to terms with — stolen land, stolen wealth, stolen labor, stolen hope — and among them is the notion of inevitability." Anyone with more than a smidgen of knowledge of British history should be their tendency to gag a little at all the pomp and circumstance surrounding his mother's funeral. 

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    Watched Godard's second feature film, Le Petit Soldat, set mostly in Geneva during the French Algerian War.  Brutal scenes of torture (burning flesh, near drowning, water-boarding, electric shock) by French intelligence agents on the protagonist, Bruno Forestier, an amoral French citizen believed to have desired information about Algerian agents.  Interesting colloquy between the protagonist and Algerian agent girlfriend:  Bruno: It's funny how everybody hates the French today.  I'm very proud to be French.  But I'm also against nationalism.  One defends ideas, not territories.  I love France because I love Joachim du Bellay and Louis Aragon.  I love Germany because I love Beethoven.  I don't love Barcelona because of Spain.  I love Spain because a city like Barcelona exists and America because I love American cars."   The French operatives end up torturing and killing Bruno's girlfriend, who was an aide of some sort for the Algerians whom she supported simply because 'they have an ideal, the French have no ideal.'  All of the characters in this film seemed like moral and emotional zombies to me, the living dead.  Watching this film and Breathless together lead me to wonder what Godard's moral and emotional state was when he made them.  I keep in mind that France was very much in the post-WWII recovery period in 1969, recovering from German occupation, living with those who collaborated with the Germans during the occupation, defeat by the colonized Vietnamese at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, reliant on the U.S. for financial and other support, and fighting a vicious was in Algeria.  The era of Camus and L'Etranger, Sartre and Huis Clos [L'enfer, c'est les autres.]  A profoundly depressing movie.  In any case, none of the characters in this film seems much alive, morally or emotionally.  So, so far, I'm not a big Godard fan though I'll try to watch some of his other films.

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Old friend Janine Geske, MULS class of 1975, posted a VERY complimentary essay she wrote about me in 2008 for the MULS Faculty Blog, with an official faculty photo of me in my 'salad days'.  I couldn't recognize the person she wrote about.  Reminded me of the classic old Lone Ranger show: 'Who WAS that masked man?' 

0920

September 20, 2022

In bed by  10:10, awake at 5 but back to sleep till 6:40, sorrowful thoughts of mother, father, and sister, all gone.  Andy to pick me up around 8 after taking Peter and Lizzie to school.

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Op-ed in this morning's NYT: "Sweden Has Become Unbearable."  "Steadily rising for the past decade, the Swedish far right has profited from the country’s growing inequalities, fostering an obsession with crime and an antipathy to migrants. Its advance marks the end of Swedish exceptionalism, the idea that the country stood out both morally and materially."  Neo-nazi party has become kingmaker in the Swedish parliament.  So it goes, here as there.

Another story of interest in this morning's NYT: "Is Choosing Death Too Easy in Canada" about recent amendments to Canada's assisted suicide law including among its beneficiaries people with chronic, “grievous and irremediable” conditions and physical disabilities even if they are not 'terminally ill.'

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Geri got a call from Hobbs re Honda: timing problem, requires replacement of timing (chain?), in excess of $800.  Needs to stay at the shop all week, no loaner available till G. squawked.  Magically, a loaner was made available. . . . . Andy got a call from Andrew, they didn't have the part that they needed to fix the Lexus, and it wouldn't be available till the end of October (2005 car!)  But they said they would adapt some other tubing that should be a permanent fix, less expensive part, more expensive labor, and the car would be available tomorrow.  I'm skeptical.😡😡😡

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Seems like I spent most of the day in the car dealing with commuter traffic to and from downtown, about 1 and 1/2 hours round trip in the morning and in the afternoon.  Plus drive to Hobbs Honda to pick up the loaner.  Shamefully irritable about all the auto expenses and frustration.  Tomorrow no driving to and from downtown and hopefully getting the Volvo back when and if Andy's new dishwasher is installed and his Lexus is fixed.🙏🙏🙏