Coming home each evening

When I come home from campus on my bike in the evening, there's a moment when I make a left turn off a busy street onto a quieter one, and this quieter street, half commercial, half residential is lined with trees in bloom. The air is mild, the trees smell good. The houses are a mixture of small condo buildings and cottages for the workers building Stanford University a hundred years ago: a single story in wood with stairs up to a shady front porch where people keep chairs to sit and watch the world go by. One of them must be rented by a group of post-university young people, because I see them sitting around a table on the porch late in the day, and when I go by earlier, the remains of their dinner, glass, a been can, are still there. 

Windhover

If you are feeling wrath- or resent-ful, here's a good place to clear your head. I used to bike past it last summer, before it opened, but Friday I went in and sat there for a while. Outside there is a reproduction of the labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral, which I walked around, cheating a little.

Nathan Oliveira is the painter of the Center's canvases, which were inspired by Hopkins' poem, which we all learned in secondary school, in my case, Grade 11 or 12, with Miss Bedford-Jones, who was the headmistress and whose 12th grade English classes were something to look forward to during all the earlier years:

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-

  dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air. . .

Resentment

Yesterday was the last session of PRG (Philosophical Reading Group) for the academic year. PRG meets 2/3 quarters, around a single book. It's open to lots of people but most are grad students and faculty. I've attended sessions on Camus, Genesis and now, Simone Veil, whose really extraordinary essay on Force and the Iliad we were reading last night, along with an essay by Rachel Bespaloff, also on the Iliad.

The question of Achilles' wrath, which Bespaloff refers to as resentment, came up. Afterwards I went on trying to define for myself the difference between anger and resentment. Nietsche, of course, says that resentment is felt when there is an imbalance of power: the weaker party feels resentment. Someone said, during the discussion, that he thought of resentment as petty. That is probably the common perception, but I wonder how true it is.

Jean Amery is his essays about surviving Auschwitz writes at length about resentment, and about how the wronged party in that situation wants / needs to turn back the clock, to somehow efface the wrong. The circumstances there are not petty. Resentment between individuals, but also between nations. The Irish against the English; the Germans after World War I's harsh reparations; Russians today against the US and Europe; Palestine... . 

Ubuweb

Here's a resource: http://ubuweb.com/

This as a result, though not absolutely direct, of going to hear Marjorie Perloff yesterday afternoon on campus. Her remit was to talk about conceptual poetry at the Hebrew Conference: Written Word, Spoken Word ; she began with O'Hara's Lunch Poems  and ended with Kenneth Goldsmith's Seven American Deaths and Disasters. Goldsmith is the founder of Ubuweb, a resource for the avant-garde and outsider poetry. Ubuweb would be great to have along on a 12-hour transatlantic flight. As you will see if you check it out.

The image is the cover of Seven American Deaths and Disasters, published by Powerhouse Books, 2013.

Little Story

Knowing he would be at the seminar I gave the noted professor a copy of my newly translated book by our mutual friend, the great French poet. He was at the head of the seminar table; I took a seat on the sidelines. After riffling the book's pages, he glanced over at me and asked, "Is this from him or from you?" "It's from me," I said.

Jean Améry

Back in January, in Paris, I was reading Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction, about the Allied bombing of German cities at the end of World War II. Sebald is interested in how this devastation (600,000 German civilians killed, seven and a half million left homeless, x cubic meters of rubble per citizen in Cologne and Dresden...) "seems to have left scarcely a trace of pain behind in the collective consciousness...has been largely obliterated from the retrospective understanding of those affected, and...never played any appreciable part in the discussion of the internal constitution of our country." 

The third essay, "Against the Irreversible," is about Jean Améry (born "Hanns Chaim Mayer") and it led me to Améry's book: At the Mind's Limits, which I began to read last weekend. Améry thinks about what happens to the mind of an intellectual in Auschwitz; in the course of his musings, he has this to say about literature:

         "The first result was always the total collapse of the esthetic view of death. [...] the intellectual, and especially the intellectual of German education and culture, bears this esthetic view of death within him. It was his legacy from the distant past, at the very latest from the time of German romanticism. It can be more or less characterized by the names Novalis, Schopenhaer, Wagner, and Thomas Mann. For death in its literary, philosophic, or musical form there was no place in Auschwitz. No bridge led from death in Auschwitz to Death in Venice. Every poetic evocation of death became intolerable... . In the camp no Tristan music accompanied death [...] For the one expecting it, its esthetic embellishment in a way became a brazen demand and, in regard to his comrades, an indecent one."

There is much more. I am writing this down here, so I remember it, because it will stick better if my fingers are involved, along with my head.

Mild rant

Now that we don't get a newspaper on our doorstep in the morning--because we no longer have a doorstep--I find myself reading Le Monde as much as The New York Times on the ipad. Usually I read the one in Paris (on paper) and the other in the US, but the news from Europe--Greece, the Ukraine, anti-Muslimism, anti-Semitism--makes me want to know what the French paper is saying. Also there are two very entertaining stories in the Society (in the sense of sociological) section of Le Monde at the moment: the Bettencourt (L'Oréal) trial and the Strauss-Kahn trial.

And this reminds me of a partly satiric article Proust wrote (it is in the collection of odds and ends called Pastiches et Mélanges) about breakfasting with the previous day's news--the entertainment value of today's Figaro, which he found folded next to his croissant and his café au lait on his tray. Mind you, being Proust, breakfast was probably well into the afternoon.

Except for the pile of "read" paper in the front hall, I would much rather--having tried both--read a real paper in the morning, or evening (in the case of Le Monde, which appears mid-afternoon), than read the paper on line. I want a proper front page. More and more silly stories are turning up online in the "Top News." Not that I mind silly stories, I just prefer to find them in the silly sections.

Besides it makes getting out of bed worthwhile when you can look forward to opening the front door and finding crispy fresh, still warm, reading material. And what would an afternoon in Paris be like if you couldn't have a quick chat with the newsie at the corner kiosk? The one Place de l'Odéon is a little grumpy, I grant you, but the one Place Vavin is charming, also the one...well you get the picture. Paris news kiosks are a whole world in themselves--not overlooking the underside of long hours, the cold and not, I imagine, much pay. The one pictured above, pinched from the internet, is St Germain du Près (dixit its caption), that is near the abbey and the two existential cafés where you can pay top price for coffee flavoured with exhaust fumes.

Tariq Ali, "It didn't need to be done"

A second, longer, thoughtful piece by Tariq Ali in the LRB of 5 February.

I think one thing (about Charlie Hebdo), I think another. It makes me displeased with myself that I can't be more clear in my thinking.