He’s quite a famous author, let’s just start with that. No longer young, and his great success came well into middle age after years of respectable literary obscurity. International prizes, Hollywood film, all that. He publishes rarely, so it’s an event to see him on stage with an eminent poet interviewing him.
The interview was somehow lackluster; maybe I felt I already knew everything he was saying, or not enough, as I haven’t yet read his latest novel. Or maybe it was the warm weather and the Prosecco I’d had with dinner. The sound was poor and I found myself wishing I were at home listening to the interview on the radio. But I was with a friend and we were still enjoying a nice evening, and had bought copies of the latest book to have signed after the interview. Continue Reading »
I didn’t really feel like going; I dislike crowds. I tend to be a melancholy stay-at-home recluse (see my earlier blog on melancholy). But the friends who invited me are always good company, and I knew it would do me good to get out (the refrain of many a recluse), to stop brooding about everything that is going wrong with my life (the refrain of many a melancholic).
If I were a teacher of creative writing, I would assign one task to my students for the year, and be paid handsomely for doing very little: I would have them read George Gissing’s New Grub Street over and over until they were all convinced they would change their degree to something useful like computer science or quantum physics, and thereby spare the world the spectacle of yet another struggling writer languishing in poverty, tuberculosis and marital strife.
It was an exceptionally warm evening—far too lovely to spend in a dark room. A rare day of summer weather in the Bay Area and there we were, about to spend three hours indoors with hundreds of equally hot bodies, in a cinema—a neighborhood one at that—hardly renowned for its modern air conditioning installation.
In the middle of the afternoon yesterday I felt a strange sad mood settle over me like a stubborn cloud, and I could find, at first, no explanation for it. I went about my work, spoke to colleagues, rode the bus home, under my little cartoon-character cloud. Only when I’d relaxed, in various ways, did another metaphorical meteorological phenomenon reveal the reasons for my cloud: a bolt from the blue told me it was because of the presidential debate we had watched earlier that day at work, during lunch and even well beyond. 
Some weeks ago a friend of mine who is a professor at a college back east called to tell me he was depressed. We’ve known each other for thirty years or more; we were students together in a class of Modern Greek in Athens. With our professor we had a regular table at a local taverna where we liberally dosed our horiatiki salad days with retsina, conversation, and sexual innuendo. He was into the Greek girls; I was into the professor. Anyway, that was a long time ago. 
etymology is black bile, hardly an attractive notion. One of the four humors: I cannot see myself as choleric, or sanguine, or phlegmatic, so I’ve always opted for the melancholic side of things. Melancholy has a bad rap, especially in these days of enforced cheerfulness and tooth whitener smiles. The word melancholy is onomatopoeic to me, something about its consonants and rhythm suggestive of languor, gentle sadness, nostalgia. Sitting alone on a veranda watching the sun go down, missing some one, but gently. 
She was born in the last of the colonial years, old enough to automatically become French at a later time in her life when she would have nowhere else to go. She was a teacher, worked at the Alliance Française in Saigon for seventeen years. She left the country, with her family, in 1981; they risked their lives on a leaky boat, more afraid of the victorious regime than of the pirates in the south China sea. There is a certain resonance in French to the English words “boat-people” that is lost in English, because it is reserved for that time when to leave Vietnam meant to survive, somehow, the terrible aftermath of a lost war. And when she says it, in her voice that is soft and questioning with a quiet humor, there is a resignation and dignity that comes from somewhere inside her, a place we can only understand intellectually. 
Juliette Gréco and Edith Piaf, and perhaps others as well. The woman in the song is expressing a feeling which could be shared by many: she hates Sundays, finds them “pretentious” and rose-colored and filled with pretexts for the middle classes to parade in crowds and act smug, while the man she loves has to go to work. If only he had Sundays off, she says, she would love Sundays—and show it—so well that other people would envy her happiness.The subtext of her little musical scenario is the loneliness that Sundays inflict upon those who are neither en couple or en famille. And while she clearly sees the ritual that is behind the traditional Sunday—church, family dinners, after-dinner walks, excursions to the country or trips to museums, along with the pretense (we’re not lonely because we’re doing what normal people do on a Sunday), she also envies these traditional activities, even those who “make love because they have nothing else to do…” 
Here is my two little red hearts’ worth for Valentine’s Day.
No doubt some of you, my American co-residents, are moaning because it’s that time of year again, when the Tax Man (hey, I’ll get out my old vinyl copy of Revolver, maybe George Harrison can cheer me up) crooks and wiggles his ugly gnarled finger at you. He wants your miserable dollars, worthless compared to a Euro or a Swiss franc, but they still add up, however many donations you make to the Gates foundation.
One of the most famous lines in English literature; a happy end to a gruesome tale of love, deception, morality, cruelty, redemption, etc. etc….you get the picture. I could almost write the blurb for the movie preview, One plain orphaned woman…one wealthy gentleman in need of a governess…
I recently had some minor surgery on my shin that turned out to be more painful than anticipated; for two days I seriously thought I would become a Vicodin junkie. All those twinges shooting across my shin like darts; the sensation of skin tugging and pulling in places where it ought not to be. Maybe I’m a wimp, with a low pain threshold; maybe because it was worse than I thought it would be I didn’t know how to deal with the unexpected incapacitation, immobility, disfigurement. I lay doped up in bed and read Chekhov and thought about the pain he must have witnessed on a regular basis in his rounds as a country doctor—although it is mainly the psychological pain which is chronicled in his work; a world without Vicodin or anaesthesia, only vodka to numb the acute awareness pain brings of our mortal, animal humanity. 
Everyone’s doing it, so is that a reason to join the fray?