Oh, crass commercialized happiness! But such sweet ethical torment to work out to the soundtrack of new CDs -- Giuliano Carmignola and the Venice Baroque Orchestra playing stylish, lush renditions of late Vivaldi. The liner notes are a bit defensive, but no reason. It's a good disc, maybe not the best Vivaldi I've ever heard, but passionate and well-read. In the sense that the musicians are clearly up to the minute in performance practice (frankly, a problem with some Italian Vivaldi, since the period instruments shtik took root there late.
Been thinking a lot about what I just called, in an email to SB, "emotional Realpolitik". Human relationships tend to get tangled, and hang up on "the things we don't talk about", "the things you used to say", et caetera, et caetera. It [men] looks and feels a bit like eating some crow sometimes, but [de] it feels better and gets results. You just take stock of the way things are right now in the friendship and you try your damnedest to make it work, and that's the best you can do.
Jeez, why can't we all just get along?
It's been a not-at-all quiet week here in Lake Meretrisha, my home town, where all the Lesbians are Russian and all the men give good head. Had a long, gutting and really rewarding talk with MG about Stuff the other day when his car broke down and I picked him up at the office to swing by his parents.
ShW (the roommate, as opposed to SW the formidable formalist formaggista or SWW the occasionally naked-in-ponds) moved in. I call her, here, ShW, to distinguish her from the others. Which is actually funny, since, if you squint, "ShW" looks a bit like "ShW" written out in Arabic. If you construe "W" as a shin and "Sh as a messy, fractured final waw. Okay, I'm on crack. Am I going to get kicked in the shins for this, wokka, wokka?
ShW and I went out to dinner tonight, which was excellent. Good conversation, good food. She and I have mad decorating ideas and, since she hasn't been living in this hellhole for two years, she's got the energy to do some cleaning. To do which I might even be persuaded to get off my lazy ass enough to help her. Cleaned out the fridge to very loud Atom and His Package the other day. There's nothing like a little angry music to make potentially disgusting tasks way more palatable. If I ever become a garbage collector, I shall sing lewd and aggressive songs on my merry rounds.
I'm reading Lucien Febvre -- ound some more in Mc*nt*re & M**r*'s the other day, in this case, a collection of essays on life in sixteenth-century France which are little pearls of wisdom all strung together with little care for their individual beauty and self-sufficiency. He's SO WELL READ. I have a picture of him cut out of the Annalistes issue of Tiger Beat pasted inside my locker. When I grow up I'm going to be just like him, except not French, if I can help it.
Oh gods, perhaps I am condemned to becoming French. A Galli-slave. How intensely I love the Couperins, the suave, thirdsy harmonies, the intricate fluttery fussings-about and the muscular, transcendent geometry which holds it all together. Surely francophilia has a cure? Wine and Watteau have certes thinned my blood, those crazy roys treschrestiens, those cheeses, that warm and sexy "r". And Stendahl. Have I told you lately how much more fun Le Rouge et le noir is when you're older than Julien Sorel? Oh, now I get it.
Here I am, feeling myself getting older. Tonight, it feels lovely. Tonight, getting older is eating well, listening to Haydn string quartets, and living in cleanliness. Getting older is pleasant, chatty dates with nice guys who don't want to tell you their whole lives in a sitting. Getting older is realizing, even as it slips away, how much time there really is to fill up. And how much more important to fill it with quality than quantity.
I want to be a Canaletto view of London -- I want to see myself with a tourist's eyes, each part of me somehow foreign to the hand that portrays me, and yet close enough to that hand, culturally, close enough that I can make valid claims to understand myself; I want to be intricate, vast, and simple all at once. I want to live, and want to love, and catch something I might be ashamed of.
What a silly double-edged gift to be able to pass for somebody younger than I am. Like most gifts, I'm not sure what I shall do with it. I shall sit it in a corner and hang my straw boater on it until the leaves turn. I'll saut� it with garlic. I'll use it to mark my place in a book.
When the snows come, and they will come early this year, I will think about the choppy Chesapeake. Gulls will needle like thread through my dreams. Enough lightbulbs, already! Sometimes, and it's OK this way, sometimes, the sun meeting the steam which rises from a cup of tea. Every once in a while, no sauce, please. Just plain is fine, thank you. That's a thought I never thought I'd think again.
Since, after all, my Quaker Panoptickal education showed me all the mountains to conquer and told me that there was no point going up them, anyway: it was cold up there and I'd have to sleep slantwise if at all, and I wouldn't get along with the indigenous folks up, to boot. No way to bake confidence into my academic brownie, I kid you not. So it's odd to take stock again with a wooly Autumnalis lumbering back in the back door again. Fruit time. Big apples, this year, you know: bigger apples don't make any better cider. You'd better watch out.
So I'm collecting everything back up into my basket, into my room, into my head, into the dry attic of my head where the bunches of herbs hang in rows like bunches of herbs. Sorry if this is too poetic to be coherent: tonight, for some reason, I can't help it. Now I've got all this stuff, what do I do with it? Well, keep it -- that goes without saying. Where would I be without all the snapshots of places I've gone? So I'm torn. Some decisions have been foisted on me: I have no choice in getting a new job. I have more choice in deciding where to move, or where to stay, and how long. Might as well make all the decisions at once.
Lucien Febvre reports to me, and I'm reporting to you, something that the ever-more-astounding Erasmus of Rotterdam once told to him, in the Colloquies:
Four men, happy, well-fed burghers, which is just yuppie in doublets and codpieces, really, are sharing a glass of wine. I am going to Santiago de Compostela, says one. Not to be outdone, the next says, I am going all the way to Rome. And the third says, well, why don't we all go together, and go first to Compostela, and then to Rome?
They set off. One of them dies in Spain. One dies en route to Italy, and the one who makes it back, thin and broken, has left the only other one sick and dying in Rome.
Febvre, bless his crabbed little heart, doesn't let the poetry of the story get in the way of the historical emanation he wants us to feel from it, how tough people were, and, I think, how tough people still are, underneath the central heating.
Keep cool,
a