Amelia had no way of knowing. She told him she would come but had no intention. Not that she would not but most likely would not go. By late August a New Yorker has no promises to keep. Why even make them then.

She had no way of knowing and no intention of finding out. He was not bad but she could do better. It could be fun but by late August fun had nothing to do with it. Amelia hated parties and even when she went she never really stayed. She could just go and what the hell. She left that at that. She guessed she would go. Not that that mattered.

There is something infuriating about shadows here in the summer. There are many shadows but not really any shade. Walking up West 4 Amelia felt fantastic. There were strangers she passed them and felt like she knew them and would never give them the time of day. It was high noon and just like a movie but with no angles. Amelia was no stunner but made for the summer.

Amelia had purchased translations of the Venetian of Veronica Franco on 6 Avenue. These translations had no value whatsoever but the typography seduced her and there were the phrases like Ecco che fuor d’un antro, or ch’io parlo, esce / coppia felice di due dame snelle, cui sempre star in un sol luogo incresce...Another East Coast cosmopolis with its loyalties tied up in trade and womanizing.

She found herself, anywhere. She had just finished L'inifini aux limites du calcul. Hilarious read. She was something else altogether. No surprises there. This would become the difficulty in her life. Nobody had anything on her. Yes and no. Yes and no. Amelia would scrawl across her notebooks out of habit. It had nothing to do with that. She knew it too. Now and then and now then. Amelia would scrawl this too. Impossible to listen and take notes. Just as well.

Amelia made her way rapidly with her eyes closed so that the sunlight and another thing from inside of her would flit across her sight. She imagined Chet Baker in his convertible under heavy snow. Cruising down 52nd with the top down. Her arms swung like those of a dancer or better yet a painter. This became her. Nobody knew but a few.

Listen. What do you want from me? Your mind always running and often away.

It went just as you would imagine. Light like matter and the street like any other but with her crossing. Every aspect marvelous and all at once over.  He had not thought of her in months and assumed nonrecognition. She had not thought of him nor seen him. It went as you would imagine but with precision. She wore a scarf and with the sun out. It would have tempered with the afternoon but for August. He had nothing to say to her. There were no coincidences.

Imagine things otherwise. Alternatives implausible as they are implacable. He could not place it. If he left the city. Wait at the light. What is the matter with you? Helicoids of particles go to where the light is.

It had other roots. His chin glistened and his concave face distanced. From half an Avenue away his physiognomy drew caricatures. Conceptions drifted further from confirmation. There were no thoughts but images. Phenomena modulated. Visuals transfigured aurally. Eventually an aroma as of a storm. It was last summer. Drops bigger than he had ever seen.

Then all over at once he had the face of a child. You have seen this in passing, not noticing. His face aged decades then.

Do the ends ever end? Sure. Just what has been must be.

Hours passed. Crepuscular August brings relief. It turns a tender shade. Then night and the debaucheries. Not that these are hard hours to waste under the polluted horizon hearing traffic and thinking of later. Not particularly.

What have you been up to? - Nothing really. I want to get out of the city. - Me too. - What you doing tonight? - No plans. - Hit me up. - Ight.

There were the sounds of the waves on the pier and there were the sounds from the Henry Hudson Parkway and there were the sounds of the crowds crossing and these sounds said nothing, some more so.

Also the Sun Parodies: In the stud book and everything.

The Sun Also Rises is a book about a whipped no dick bitch and a rich whipped limey bitch and a hilarious taxidermy enthusiast and amateur trout, but most of all it is about the Jew who got away. Also, The Sun Also Rises features a Male Lolita. Refer to Adam Green vizaviz Essentially, a Lolita is predator who charms you with her appetite for sweets and her other kitten-like “eccentricities.” She’s looking to let somebody down, and do it in a sexy way. Note: Beware of grown-women who impersonate Lolitas because they are gold-diggers. Sensible enough. The plot hinges on whether or no the Male Lolita (the sole Spaniard not a caricature but rather a Fétiche) fits into his pants. He does but only for a while.

Brett (Her Highness Miss Rope-A-Dope) distracts the main characters from their male bounding. Brett has a fine chin. Brett simply turns all to jelly when touched. Like a flat Jelly Roll Morton sort of character. Chested and pitchy. "I think it's [love] hell ["Oh, cut out the prep-school stuff."] on earth." Brett's face was white. "I say, do I look too much of a mess?" You don't look it.

***

“I'm too far behind you now to catch up and be any fun."

"Don't be an ass."

Don't let's

***

"You talk sort of bitter."

"Sorry. I didn't mean to. I was just trying to give you the facts.”

***

“But implied remembrances of the past involve more than Jake's own wounding. They concern the historical past, too; they concern what has ‘already happened,’ not only to the narrator Jake Barnes personally, but not for me etc.” It would have been marvelous tho, could Hem write Jake so intimately that things happened in the story only to him, and for him, and then his past would be his to keep. I suppose the book would have sold less but honestly Hem would be better off.

Hem had a taste for irony and academicians have an unquenchable thirst. I think the argument for codified names (whores) and slangs (particularly Anglo and Germanic - daunted, nix) carried its weight in mystique. This seems to have been a Parisian trend. Andre Salmon and Guillaume Apollinaire among friends talked a befuddling composite slang of princely and thuggish French. They also famously challenged friends to duels and then for days sent seconds (friends of friends) back and forth from rival cafes negotiating terms. World War I would put an end to that silliness. Jake and Bill are hilarious, but they have paid a price in bitterness.

I fear that certain esteemed, spurious scholars display a preference for out of the way explanations. As in “Here, Jake jokingly identifies Bill to Brett as a taxidermist. 'That was in another country,' Bill said. 'And besides all the animals were dead’ (pp. 80-81). In Hemingway's fiction, ‘in another country’ implies the country of war and death. (Bill, who says that he is a naturalist or "nature-writer," may be alluding to the millions of horses and mules killed at the front, as Hemingway does in "A Natural History of the Dead.” True and as I am sure William Adair well knows Marlow from the School of Night and his hilarious:

FRIAR BARNARDINE. Thou hast committed--

BARABAS. Fornication: but that was in another country;

And besides, the wench is dead.

Ernest the Grandmaster of Literary Minimalism shows off some semi-caricatured-anti-Semitism: "I could reach him always, he wrote, through his bankers.” Also that bit about the nose. Also haha "Must clean myself.” "Oh, rot! Come on."

Another example of Ernest at his finest.

"I haven't seen you since I've been back," Brett said. (She has, but not intimately)

"No." (agrees "you haven't" and disagrees i.e. no?)

"How are you, Jake?" (intimacy)

"Fine." (would not be wounded)

Brett looked at me. (owwie emotionally wounded)

“We said good night. ‘I'm sorry I can't go,’  Mike said. Brett laughed.” Brilliant, Brett, hot stuff, laughs that Mike would be sorry he can't, nullifying Mike and EMOTIONALLY WOUNDING everybody. "Indeed not!”

***

LOSSES: “Jake’s loss of his sexual potency and Brett, Robert Cohn’s loss of Brett, and Brett’s loss of Jake and Pedro Romero.” Brett does not give a damn about either of those losses. Cohn does not loose anything. He knocks them both down and lays down the other and walks away scot-free after some sentimental indigestion. Jake has of course given more than his life and an Englishman at that poor Jake to make matters worse an Englishman. Bill Gorton has a massive stomach. He behaves rather like an abused orca whale at sea world. He is the only likable character and a killer ladies man. But Brett gets the best of the best of them.

She took his tavern parliament, his cap, his cocky dance

She mocked his female fashions and his working-class mustache.

This all goes to say that Hemingway had a bloody good laugh writing this novel despite all that trash about sitting at a typewriter and bleeding. Quite! Don’t let’s do indeed! You are a regular Fonald Rirbank! Hmmm. Growl

***

Fitz. Fitz writing for the youth of his generation and the critics of ever after.  About nobody have worse or more essays been written.  I hear words I never heard in the bible. What a doll. And not bad to look at but peculiar. Like milk not quite turned. Fitz, very Romantic, like a tic submerged in champaign. His characters behave like children were children utterly charmless and unspontaneous. He had a sellable brand of observant narrow-mindedness. He apologized in a preface for taking 16 years on not Ulysses. Great God, Fitz. Put some clothes on. You look like crouching Aphrodite. Nobody can take you seriously if you insist on winking after every phrase. Like gotcha journalism after an informercial. I value you so little and yet you read well. Floyd Mayweather will beat that karaoke-evangelical parliamentarian into another dimension and neocolonialism will roar. I bet Fitzgerald would too. His dream after all is all of ours. Chlorinated like a public swimming pool.

I read all of Francis' novels from the Beautiful and the Damned on. Tender is the Night is probably his best but why not read Keats and leave it at that.  They are great reads.  Francis Scott Key penned the Star-Spangled Banner but he plagiarized it like Bob Dylan but jingoistic and not much of a pimp. In the good way. Pimps are not what they were. Ever since Don Juan's Reckless Daughter they feel emasculated and eviscerated like a rhyming dictionary hanging too long around Walt Clyde.

Frazier is Liberty now, not the blasted Statue of Surveillance.

"The word jazz in its progress toward respectability has meant first sex, then dancing, then music. It is associated with a state of nervous stimulation, not unlike that of big cities behind the lines in a war." O Fitz. As Sidney would say You got to be in the sun to feel the sun.

***

Ernest and Ezra would travel through Italy together and would write pithy, back country epistles while away. For awhile they were rarely apart. They were living in the same arrondissement in Paris through the 20s. This was a breakthrough time for both of them. Ezra would write Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and reanimate Propertius and Ernest would publish his first groundbreaking short stories and the blockbuster novels The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway had the charm of a disciplined but irascible disciple and Ezra by all accounts was a generous, ingenious and dubious mentor. They relished the posture of a cowboy bohemian in Paris. Twin modernist from Idaho and Illinois, Hem and Ez brought verve and musculature to the efflorescent Parisian kulture of that epoch.

They really were soulmates in those early days. Lovers of satire and honesty with a taste of bawdy humor and womanizing that would go on to define American verse and prose prosody. Disagreeing on politics and the universality of bullfighting, Papa and Grampa had a falling out. Hemingway condemning Pound to ridicule from his fascist sympathies (if you could call it that) and Pound for Papa's lack thereof. Among the insults flung this one surpasses all: “Since when are you an economist, pal? The last I knew you you were a fuckin' bassoon player." Ezra famously had an avid taste for music with indefinite (to put it delicately) talent. Pound also pursued a colossal range of interests from Confucian odes to Social Credit. Impresario par excellence Pound corresponded with everybody from Cocteau to George Santayana. Hemingway had diverse interests as well. 'Gee I'd love to take you to a bull fight. You'd like it better than anything I'll bet ... I saw 3 matadors badly gored out of 24 bulls killed.' Tourists before tourism was almost universal among middle class Americans, these youngins bragged to their compatriots back home of distant Romantic lands of matadors and holocausts.

***

But nobody wants an argument over pathos and bathos any more than anybody wants to distinguish. But do learn to discriminate. D.H. Lawrence stuck in a stucco wall. But as to the technique, of course it is emasculate, excuse me immaculate. Ford Maddox Ford had the genuine affection of many brilliant man. Pound, William Carlos Williams, both of whom wrote charming eulogy to the man. I laugh to think of you wheezing in Heaven. He was at any rate a stupendously liar. Williams blurts out damn it you lied grossly / sometimes. But it was all, I / see now, a carelessness, the part  of a man / that is homeless here on earth. Touching and Hem would spit on it. But how so? Ford Maddox Ford had been cast out of English literary and social favor and aligned himself progressively with the avant-gard of American and French letters. Pound praises Ford  in that Fordie / never dented an idea for a phrase’s sake. This refers to an honesty beyond language. As for Paris and verité, Hem and Ford told their truth. They were as a matter of fact and a matter of speaking full of it.

***

Sextus Propertius loiters by Q.H. Flaccus' book-stall catcalling. Just an all around nuisance. In snakeskin pants. Frank gets a little Verlaine. There are a parti-color lights somewhere. And Hemingway browses through the Russians on a blustery day. Bookseller to modernist what  folksinger is to manager. Rocknroll

***

Ernest composes his Sylvia so gracefully, with such resolute tenderness, one thinks of portraits Cézanne did of his son Paul. Humanity and craft and heart, wherever whatever that is, Cézanne so moved by his public, must paints more meticulously, made up of mes petites sensations.

***

Gertrude Stein and Hemingway had a peculiar friendship. Much has been written about how Hemingway learned from Stein. Something about repetition and the American idiom. Much has been written about how Hemingway assisted Stein. Much has been written about the ways the pair betrayed each other. Not much has been written about the whimsical and tender friendship of a then unknown matriarch of American letters and a young aspiring poet and journalist.

Gertrude Stein is hilarious. Her facility and wry sensibility paired with her intellect and sharp perceptive prowess become her to such a degree that despite her linguistic overhaul of the language her prose remains sociable and one finds a levity and grace in everything she has written. Cependant controversy has surrounded Gertrude from the onset and she has always embraced this just as she embraced celebrity later in her career. I would not call Gertrude Stein an abstract writer any more than I would call Picasso an abstract painter but both ventured further into ambiguity and reduction than anybody before them. Tender Buttons has its parallel in Cubism wherein forms are not so much abstract as dissociated or wrought and Stanzas in Meditation reminds me in its spontaneity and simplicity of late Picasso. Picasso and Stein also had refined noses for publicity. Stein apparently demanded that any magazine that published parodies of Tender Buttons also include her original because after all nothing could be funnier or more interesting.

I mean the city. Is it really? You better believe it. You can feel it. You take your chances. You fake the changes. You get off. You have a conversation for once. Here you are. You're late. Make no mistake about it. Finally something I can get into. You say and you yawn. Nobody laughs. You're not even kidding.

Get together. Take your time. Get lost.

Around the corner and there you are. What would a tree do with an avenue? You take a lot for granted. My favorite thing about you is you always do too. What are you looking at? Sounds like it.

What you do to me.

How to talk about what could have been? No fuss. You look it. Too much to ask for your attention.

Seen worse. Be honest.

Better get out of here.

losses: Jake’s loss of his sexual potency and Brett, Robert Cohn’s loss of Brett, and Brett’s loss of Jake and Pedro Romero. Brett does not give a damn about either of those losses. Cohn does not loose anything. He knocks them both down and lays down the other and walks away scot-free after some sentimental indigestion. Jake has of course given more than his life and an Englishman at that poor Jake to make matters worse an Englishman. Bill Gorton has a massive stomach. He behaves rather like an abused orca whale at sea world. He is the only likable character and a killer ladies man. But Brett gets the best of the best of them. She took his tavern parliament, his cap, his cocky dance / She mocked his female fashions and his working-class mustache. This all goes to say that Hemingway had a bloody good laugh writing this novel despite all that trash about sitting at a typewriter and bleeding. Quite! Don’t let’s do indeed! You are a regular Fonald Rirbank! Hmmm. Grwl

I am no good at meditating. O well. Well well well. I felt like Gus the polar bear at the central park zoo. Caged, now dead, spirited Gus. The contemplative Polar Bear. I had no cage to fall back on. I like to look and mutter things and even sing. I live a life of extraction.

Seine flooding
blood to the mind
O Gus
paddle on down

But implied remembrances of the past involve more than Jake's own wounding. They concern the historical past, too; they concern what has "already happened," not only to the narrator Jake Barnes personally, but not for me etc. It would have been marvelous tho, could Hem write Jake so intimately   that things happened in the story only to him and for him and his past was his to keep. I suppose the book would have sold less but honestly Hem would be better off. This article, fascinating, revealing. Hem had a taste for irony and these academicians have a thirst. I think the argument for codified names (whores) and slangs (particularly Anglo and Germanic - daunted, nix) carried its weight in mystique. This seems to have been a trend in Paris. Andre Salmon and Guillaume Apollinaire among friends talked an elaborately befuddling slang of princely and mechanic's French. They also famously challenged friends to duels and then for days sent seconds (friends of friends) back and forth from rival cafes negotiating terms. World War I would put an end to that silliness. Jake and Bill are hilarious, but they have paid a price in bitterness.

I fear the esteemed scholar occasionally displayed an amusing preference for out of the way explanations. As they continue down the street, they come across Brett, then proceed to the Cafe Lilas for a drink. Here, Jake jokingly identifies Bill to Brett as a taxidermist. '"That was in another country,' Bill said. 'And besides all the animals were dead'" (pp. 80-81). In Hemingway's fiction, "in another country" implies the country of war and death. (Bill, who says that he is a naturalist or "nature-writer," may be alluding to the millions of horses and mules killed at the front, as Heming? way does in "A Natural History of the Dead."16) True and as I am sure William Adair well knows:

FRIAR BARNARDINE. Thou hast committed--

BARABAS. Fornication: but that was in another country;

And besides, the wench is dead.

I believe T.S. Eliot and the steamed EZ also alluded to this wit and wisdom.

"emotionally wounded"

As for the grandmaster of literary minimalism himself. Some semi anti semitism: "I could reach him always, he wrote, through his bankers." Bam bop bam bop bop and down.

Also haha
"Must clean myself."
"Oh, rot! Come on."-

In the stud book and everything. Album title.

We said good night. "I'm sorry I can't go," Mike said. Brett laughed. I looked back from the door. Mike had one hand on the bar and was leaning toward Brett, talking. Brett was looking at him quite coolly, but the corners of her eyes were smiling. Brilliant, Brett, hot stuff, laughs that Mike would be sorry he can't, nullifying Mike and EMOTIONALLY WOUNDING everybody

"Indeed not!"

"I haven't seen you since I've been back," Brett said. (She has, but not intimately)
"No." (agrees "you haven't" and disagrees i.e. no?)
"How are you, Jake?" (intimacy)
"Fine." (would not be wounded)
Brett looked at me. (owie wounded)

It was dim and dark and the pill (ars went high up,

The Sun Also Rises is a book about a whipped no dick bitch and a rich whipped limey bitch and a hilarious taxidermy enthusiast and amateur trout, but most of all it is about the Jew who got away. Also, The Sun Also Rises features a Male Lolita. Refer to Adam Green vizaviz Essentially, a Lolita is predator who charms you with her appetite for sweets and her other kitten-like “eccentricities.” She’s looking to let somebody down, and do it in a sexy way. Note: Beware of grown-women who impersonate Lolitas because they are gold-diggers. Sensible enough. The plot hinges on whether or no the Male Lolita (the sole Spaniard not a caricature but rather a Fétiche) fits into his pants. He does but only for a while.

Brett (Her Highness Miss Rope-A-Dope) distracts the main characters from their male bounding. Brett has a fine chin. Brett simply turns all to jelly when touched. Like a flat Jelly Roll Morton sort of character. Chested and pitchy. "I think it's [love] hell ["Oh, cut out the prep-school stuff."] on earth." Brett's face was white. "I say, do I look too much of a mess?" You don't look it.

Aloysius Gonzaga

"I'm too far behind you now to catch up and be any fun."
"Don't be an ass."
Don't let's


 "You talk sort of bitter."
"Sorry. I didn't mean to. I was just trying to give you the facts." 

LOL I laugh at the incredible torments my persecutors constantly give themselves in vain Haterz After having sought ten years for a man in vain, I finally had to extinguish my lantern and cry out: "There are no more! Going for a where have all the cowboys gone kind of thing like Dylan i think I’m gonna do april or so is a cruel month & how you like your blue eyed boy NOW mr octopus? Somebody had to say something

I sought for it and found it: it came from amour-propre which, after having become indignant about men, also rebelled against reason.

Fascinating and original. Essentially from the yoke of opinion signed honeyed malignity.

But certain that they have no other new hold by which they can affect me with a permanent feeling, I laugh at all  their intrigues and enjoy myself in spite of them. catch a body and we laugh about it

Boy, was I thrilled! O Langston Hughes, adorable. I like the sentence "and to take it personally" as a good thing. Then a little thing here and there like "and they would dump it into the ice buckets if they could."

"She had been a swell friend and I liked her." Nothing much but all right with me.

Baldwin writes that he went to Paris because "I wanted to find out in what way the specialness of my experience could be made to connect me with other people instead of dividing me from them.” This sentiment has such humble humanity that the esotericism and exoticism of say Eliot and Pound comes off cowardly. You have to admire Baldwin for rising above his “pride and contempt,” while putting to words the  “bitterly accumulated perception” with patience and something more, honesty rooted in love. His observations are keen and unique: [culture] was something neither desirable nor undesirable in itself, being inevitable, being nothing more or less than the recorded and visible effects on a body of people of the vicissitudes with which they have been forced to deal. And their great men are revealed as simply another of these vicissitudes, even if, quite against their will, the brief battle of their great men with them has left them richer.” He investigates the “color problem” with the savoir faire of one who has long navigated those furious seas. His nuanced perceptions come from a good ear and intellect. His narratives are simultaneously inclusive and selective and have the ingenuity akin to the practices of Drs. Chekhov and Williams.

Interesting that Baldwin refers to the unsentimental French much as Gertrude Stein does but to a disparate argument. “And the fact, perhaps, that the French are the earth's least sentimental people and must also be numbered among the most proud aggravates the plight of their lowest, youngest, and unluckiest members, for it means that the idea of rehabilitation is scarcely real to them.” Compare this to what Stein writes "well that too is intelligent on the part of France and unsentimental, because after all the way everything is remembered is by the writers and painters of the period, nobody really lives who has not been well written about and in realising that the french show their usual sense of reality and a belief in a sense of reality is the twentieth century, people may not have it but they do believe in it."

Take it from Baldwin: White Americans do not understand the depths out of which such an ironic tenacity comes, but they suspect that the force is sensual, and they are terrified of sensuality, and do not any longer understand it. The word “sensual” is not intended to bring to mind quivering dusky maidens or priapic black studs. I am referring to something much simpler and much less fanciful. To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.

wham bam

Also shout out to the knitted sweater from a mono prix

"There is no structure he can build strong enough to keep out this self-knowledge."

Phoebe had no way of knowing. She told him she would come but she really had no intention. Not that she would not go but she most likely would not. By late August a New Yorker has no promises to keep. Why even make them then. Phoebe had no way of knowing and no intention of finding out. He was not bad but she could do better. It could be fun but by late August fun had nothing to do with it. Phoebe hated parties and even when she went she never really stayed. She could just go and what the hell. Phoebe left that at that. She guessed she would go. Not that that mattered.

There is something infuriating about shadows in New York in the summer. There are many shadows but not really any shade. Walking up West 4 Phoebe felt fantastic. There were strangers she passed them and felt like she knew them and would never give them the time of day. It was high noon and just like a movie but better than any movie Phoebe had ever seen and there were no angles. Phoebe was no stunner but made for the summer.

Phoebe had purchased translations of the Venetian of Veronica Franco on 6 Avenue. These translations had no value whatsoever but the typography seduced her and there were the phrases like Ecco che fuor d’un antro, or ch’io parlo, esce / coppia felice di due dame snelle, cui sempre star in un sol luogo incresce...Another East Coast cosmopolis with its loyalties tied up in trade and womanizing.

Fitz. Fitz writing for the youth of his generation and the critics of ever after.  About nobody have worse or more essays been written.  I hear words I never heard in the bible. What a doll. And not bad to look at but peculiar. Like milk not quite turned. Fitz, very Romantic, like a tic submerged in champaign. His characters behave like children were children utterly charmless and unspontaneous. He had a sellable brand of observant narrow-mindedness. He apologized in a preface for taking 16 years on not Ulysses. Great God, Fitz. Put some clothes on. You look like crouching Aphrodite. Nobody can take you seriously if you insist on winking after every phrase. Like gotcha journalism after an informercial. I value you so little and yet you read well. Floyd Mayweather will beat that karaoke-evangelical parliamentarian into another dimension and neocolonialism will roar. I bet Fitzgerald would too. His dream after all is all of ours. Chlorinated like a public swimming pool.

I read all of Francis' novels from the Beautiful and the Damned on. Tender is the Night is probably his best but why not read Keats and leave it at that.  They are great reads.  Francis Scott Key penned the Star-Spangled Banner but he plagiarized it like Bob Dylan but jingoistic and not much of a pimp. In the good way. Pimps are not what they were. Ever since Don Juan's Reckless Daughter they feel emasculated and eviscerated like a rhyming dictionary hanging too long around Walt Clyde.

Frazier is Liberty now, not the blasted Statue of Surveillance. As for Francis Scott Key

Praise, my soul, the God that sought thee,
Wretched wanderer, far astray;
Found thee lost, and kindly brought thee
From the paths of death away;
Praise, with love's devoutest feeling,
Him Who saw thy guilt-born fear,
And the light of hope revealing,
Bade the blood-stained cross appear.

Ben Frank shuldve done sumthan bout that

History is a total waste of time.

It happened just as you would imagine. Light like matter and the street like any other but with her crossing. Every aspect marvelous and all at once over.  He had not thought of her in months and assumed nonrecognition. She had not thought of him nor seen him. It happened as you would imagine but with precision. She wore a scarf and with the sun out. It would have tempered with the afternoon but for August. He had nothing to say to her. There were no coincidences.

He could imagine things otherwise. There were always alternatives. These were implausible as they were implacable. He could not place it. If he left the city. What is the matter. Helicoids of particles traverse where the light is. Wait at the light for the out the

Hours passed. Crepuscular August brings relief. It turns a tender shade. Then night and the debaucheries. Not that these are hard hours to waste under the polluted horizon hearing traffic and thinking of later. Not particularly.

What have you been up to? - Nothing really. I want to get out of the city. - Me too. - What you doing tonight? - No plans.

There were the sounds of the waves on the pier and there were the sounds from the Henry Hudson Parkway and there were the sounds of the crowds crossing and these sounds said nothing, some more so.

Phoebe had no way of knowing. She told him she would come but she really had no intention. Not that she would not go but she most likely would not. By late August a New Yorker has no promises to keep. Why even make them then. Phoebe had no way of knowing and no intention of finding out. He was not bad but she could do better. It could be fun but by late August fun had nothing to do with it. Phoebe hated parties and even when she went she never really stayed. She could just go and what the hell. Phoebe left that at that. She guessed she would go. Not that that mattered.

There is something infuriating about shadows in New York in the summer. There are many shadows but not really any shade. Walking up West 4 Phoebe felt fantastic. There were strangers she passed them and felt like she knew them and would never give them the time of day. It was high noon and just like a movie but better than any movie Phoebe had ever seen and there were no angles. Phoebe was no stunner but made for the summer.

Papa and Old EZ

Ernest and Ezra would travel through Italy together and would write pithy, back country epistles while away. For awhile they were rarely apart. They were living in the same arrondissement in Paris through the 20s. This was a breakthrough time for both of them. Ezra would write Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and reanimate Propertius and Ernest would publish his first groundbreaking short stories and the blockbuster novels The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway had the charm of a disciplined but irascible disciple and Ezra by all accounts was a generous, ingenious and dubious mentor. They relished the posture of a cowboy bohemian in Paris. Twin modernist from Idaho and Illinois, Hem and Ez brought verve and musculature to the efflorescent Parisian kulture of that epoch.

They really were soulmates in those early days. Lovers of satire and honesty with a taste of bawdy humor and womanizing that would go on to define American verse and prose prosody. Disagreeing on politics and the universality of bullfighting, Papa and Grampa had a falling out. Hemingway condemning Pound to ridicule from his fascist sympathies (if you could call it that) and Pound for Papa's lack thereof. Among the insults flung this one surpasses all: “Since when are you an economist, pal? The last I knew you you were a fuckin' bassoon player." Ezra famously had an avid taste for music with indefinite (to put it delicately) talent. Pound also pursued a colossal range of interests from Confucian odes to Social Credit. Impresario par excellence Pound corresponded with everybody from Cocteau to George Santayana. Hemingway had diverse interests as well. 'Gee I'd love to take you to a bull fight. You'd like it better than anything I'll bet ... I saw 3 matadors badly gored out of 24 bulls killed.' Tourists before tourism was almost universal among middle class Americans, these youngins bragged to their compatriots back home of distant Romantic lands of matadors and holocausts.

When Hemingway writes that Ezra was "more Catholic" of course we must take him at his word.

"Great literary periods, like that of Provence in the twelfth century, may be almost destitute of literary sense and of literary criteria; this sense and these criteria might even have prevented the periods." | "Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture." -Juan Ramon Jimenez

And after the litany of misplaced names "Also Alcools, by Guillaume Apollonaire (Mercure), is clever."

"As if like the earth itself they had participated in all the cataclysms of nature..."

On his grand obsessional walks Henry Miller babbles on about this and that and blows his allowance on an superfluous battalion of sex workers. His claims to fame being mainly his instaprose and erect pose. I found moving his elegy to the dead of Brooklyn. And of course he influenced everyone. The world will go out like a Roman Candle. And we all have heard Kerouac say it. And he did pin humanity on the mindless hive charge. All and all a man to be reckoned with. His spiel features the driveling generalizations of a beleaguered relative and none of the buoyant tenderness of true ingenious improvisers of American prosody. But what the hell. I got to say that I could never get through a book of his. But what do I know. Problem is his porno is not too hot. Compared with the greats like Fernando de Rojas and the anonymous Apollinaire and Pierre Louys and later Joyce - nothing going. Also Henry Miller is the Blockbuster of writers. Plus his liberated sexuality is as lame as the fetishism of Mussolini, Hem labeled the biggest bluff in Europe. I always liked Anias Ninn. She can write. Who cares about their love triangle tho? I mean goddamn. Partigiani wear polkadot pantaloons. Henry Miller hated New York. His East Coast lays were lame. He worked as a Dostoyevskian clerk. I think he had a business card. I believe Fyodor paid him under the table. He ate a friends houses. He was a regular Freddie Freeloader Moose the Mooche. He wrote too much about this and nobody can read it. You read Sexus or worse Plexus. Henry Miller put down Bob Dylan as a ping pong player but not as a poet. He knew nothing of poetry. His tin man ear and Ron Burgundy heart are terrifically modern. Henry Miller only ran into automatons in America. Nobody there had any earthiness. They only wanted it in streetcars. Dodgers and lodgers and airconditioned codgers. Henry Miller wails Let us have more oceans,more upheavals, more wars, more holocausts. You better believe it. Ezra Pound tried to get Henry to write a pamphlet on money. You should read it, hilarious. Money and How It Gets That Way. Amazing! To walk in money through the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath money, no least single object anywhere that is not money. Money, money everywhere and still not enough! And then no money, or a little money, or less money, or more money but money always money. and if you have money, or you don't have money, it is the money that counts, and money makes money, but what makes money make money? Henry Miller pens an essay on Séraphîta by Honoré de and says he has not read it but digs it. Baad.

"He wanted to take this whole…you know, somewhere. Later on, we talked about it… He and I have been talking on the phone about the human…the development of the humanitarian, you know, stuff…the human aspect of what you’re doing, no matter what profession it is." - Wayne Shorter

New York's wild. I mean the city. Is it really? You better believe it. You can feel it. You take your chances. You fly thru the changes. Have a conversation for once. You get off. Here you are. You're late. Make no mistake about it. Finally something I can get into. You say and you yawn. Nobody laughs. Not even kidding. You purchase the fourth volume of A Natural History of the Ducks off a guy on the corner. Man this weather is something else. Something awful. Would you want it any other way. Yes any other way.

I get hysterical sometimes. You say and laugh. Somebody yawns. You put words on the page. Outrageous. You say it to piss me off.

You elocute like a goddamn grand piano. You know that. You string together pearls of syllables. I just feel bad for the clams man. You empathize too much. You can go to Portland if you feel that way. Bunch of Harvard grads collecting unemployment. Sounds like hell.

America has a real thing going for it. You drone on and on. You make me sick. You get together. You get lost. You never take the time to modulate. You always chasing tail like Dizzy Gillespie. You mistake foreigners for Italians. You embarrass me. New York looks like shit. Hot shit.

You investigate fraud. You lie the whole time. You say phony to be ironic ironically. Some of the turtles made it to the sea. Some of us…

What else is there to do? And is there anything besides that? After all there is not much difference but you are better off going. Definitely than staying, which is worse. Could you imagine?  Not just anybody has the right. And of way and that complicates things. Things are everywhere and everything. Like signage. Like a post that is lamp or somebody. Lying appeals to me. It has a particular appeal. Liking has nowhere near the same appeal. It could be anywhere, not in this case. Appealing applies to conversion. In this case as in any free market. Contagion converses. In an ideal world. In any case. Oh. You have a reason. This is then a much less interesting conversation. And there you have it. Then campaigning ends in champagne. You again, Shampoo.

Walking bass. Very funny, like the fish. More like, flopping! Jesu where were you going with that.  Excuse you. And take it with you.

Go around the corner and there you are. What else would trees do with an avenue? You take a lot for granted. My favorite thing about you is you do and the best thing for you too. What are you looking at? Take a walk pal.

What you to do me. Standard. You Phrygian son of a bitch. What an insult! I got you. You say it to a retired person too.

Sure I like it but mostly it. I could go for that sure. Some Jack Montrose. Am I right or am I right. You play too much piano. Always on your beat like Tart Atum. Elsewhere known as "Up and At Up." Gramps for my taste, I would. You and what tennis racket. Topical drinks.

Tiny umbrellas. This is a plus for society. You could even say miniature. Sure you could. But you have to have. Trample over any old leaf like a child. Put 2 and 2 together.

The curiosity of all Paris will not be assuaged until she knows what M. Jacques de Lacretelle will say this afternoon-is saying now-about Henri de Regnier. It will be frontpage news, stop-press news, crowding out all tidings of bombs on Barcelona, in an hour or so and for all tomorrow, in all the papers of France. All minds here are on the figure of the handsome, young Monsieur Jacques who is standing under the cupola, in his green uniform - with his sword at his side, because Napoleon thought that Men of Letters were gentlemen and should have the wherewithal to fight duels - waiting to deliver his eulogy of his predecessor in the academic fauteuil that he shall occupy.

This passage is hilarious. Of course Ford does not mention the stance of M. Jacques de Lacretelle in albeit ambivalent defense of European Jewry as it was known then and the political motive.

Ford Maddox Ford was a bugger of a chap and had the wit of an Albion caterpillar. All high and mighty and with just a bit of goodnight, good ladies for you there. And good old Ford had almost no lower jaw if you care about that sort of thing and you do. His writing pleases like passing gas. Funny in a silly way but also necessary. Ford is also a snob in the Proustian sense. Impossible to be unenvious of the gentleman that pens this phrase: Of intrinsic value as a wife, I think she had none at all for me. I fancy I was not even proud of the way she dressed. Or this nugget of a gem: Well, it was the first time I had ever been embraced by a woman-- and it was the last when a woman's embrace has had in it any warmth for me. . . . And finally an Englishman has written seriously about American sacramental marriage. Ford M. Ford is as Anglo as he is obese. And he should know about commuter practices: Florence had, of course, several other fellows, too--strapping young New Englanders, who worked during the day in New York and spent only the evenings in the village of their birth. This must have been a novel concept. But honestly I actually read The Good Soldier, not read, listened on Librivox a few years back, and being utter disinterest I found  The Good Soldier (book report style) to be most hilarious saddest story I ever heard at triple the speed. Actually I remember now that I listened to it while weeding beets on the West Coast. West Coast beets baby. I also listened then to The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by Mark Twain another batshit ridiculous book.

An emotional affect sounds like a overstatement to me. Affected emotion maybe. Affectation and not affection as in nothing matters but the quality. But nobody wants an argument over pathos and bathos any more than anybody wants to distinguish. But do learn to discriminate. D.H. Lawrence stuck in a stucco wall. But as to the technique, of course it is emasculate, excuse me immaculate. Ford Maddox Ford had the genuine affection of many brilliant man. Pound, William Carlos Williams, both of whom wrote charming eulogy to the man. I laugh to think of you wheezing in Heaven. He was at any rate a stupendously liar. Williams blurts out damn it you lied grossly / sometimes. But it was all, I / see now, a carelessness, the part  of a man / that is homeless here on earth. Touching and Hem would spit on it. But how so? Ford Maddox Ford had been cast out of English literary and social favor and aligned himself progressively with the avant-gard of American and French letters. Pound praises Ford  in that Fordie / never dented an idea for a phrase’s sake. This refers to an honesty beyond language. As for Paris and verité, Hem and Ford told their truth. They were as a matter of fact and a matter of speaking full of it. 

A Moveable Feast has moved me. What can I say? And what else?

Mayakovsky was a good guy and killed

himself, I suppose, not to embarass you.

What else is there to do? And is there anything besides that? After all there is not much difference but you are better off going. Definitely than staying, which is worse. Could you imagine?  Not just anybody has the right. And of way and that complicates things. Things are everywhere and everything. Like signage. Like a post that is lamp or somebody. Lying appeals to me. It has a particular appeal. Liking has nowhere near the same appeal. It could be anywhere, not in this case. Appealing applies to conversion. In this case as in any free market. Contagion converses. In an ideal world. In any case. Oh. You have a reason. This is then a much less interesting conversation. And there you have it. Then campaigning ends in champagne. You again, Shampoo.

Walking bass. Very funny, like the fish. More like, flopping! Jesu where were you going with that.  Excuse you. And take it with you.

Go around the corner and there you are. What else would trees do with an avenue? You take a lot for granted. My favorite thing about you is you do and the best thing for you too. What are you looking at? Take a walk pal.

What you to do me. Standard. You Phrygian son of a bitch. What an insult! I got you. You say it to a retired person too.

Sure I like it but mostly it. I could go for that sure. Some Jack Montrose. Am I right or am I right. You play too much piano. Always on your beat like Tart Atum. Elsewhere known as "Up and At Up." Gramps for my taste, I would. You and what tennis racket. Topical drinks.

Tiny umbrellas. This is a plus for society. You could even say miniature. Sure you could. But you have to have. Trample over any old leaf like a child. Put 2 and 2 together.

"or maybe how he did not do what he could have done." Hem

How to talk about what could have been. Could have been a contender. But without the fuss. How to tell of loss that once told is no longer lost. How anybody could possibly care. With things as they are and not much time for them to stay that way. Too much to ask for your attention.

  Victor Linart, "le sioux," with his bike looking like a bad motherfucker.

Hemingway pairing Ronald Firbank and Scott Fitzgerald in the affections of Miss Stein - another swipe at Francis' masculinity. Marvelous comparison however. Really these novelists do share a gay felicity. Eminently readable. A la mode and in vogue. Satire not too wry and not too nice. Just the kind of thing anybody likes.

I always love the passage of Hemingway walking home at night and criticizing the monuments. Truly unbelievable and so honest. Paris is a still city by night. 21st century elsewhere.

Jeez, Gertrude Stein, literary Godmother, burn. Study abroad in an ambulance: Archibald Macleish, dos Pasos, Hem, e.e. cummings. Disillusion fuses with genius. Many who had it so

Gun em down. We cannot consecrate - we cannot hallow -  this ground. Duh

"The word jazz in its progress toward respectability has meant first sex, then dancing, then music. It is associated with a state of nervous stimulation, not unlike that of big cities behind the lines in a war." O Fitz. As Sidney would say You got to be in the sun to feel the sun.

Still Life

Paul Gauguin

In my yellow room - sunflowers, with purple eyes, stand against the yellow walls, bathing their feet in a yellow flower pot, on a yellow table. - In the corner of the interior, the signature of a painter: Vincent. And the yellow sun, flooding through the yellow drapes of my room, flowering golden everywhere, and the morning, from my bed, when I wake, I imagine that all this smells very good.

O, yes! He loves yellow, this good Vincent, this painter from Holland. Sun warms his soul. A horror of fog. A need to warm.

Together in Arles we go crazy, always warring over beautiful colors. As for me, I adore red - where can I find the perfect vermillion? As for him, tracing his yellowest brush along the wall, all of a sudden purple.

Je suis sain d’Esprit

Je suis Saint-Esprit

In my yellow room, a little still life. Purple, this one. A pair of enormous shoes, used, deformed. The shoes of Vincent. Those he took, a lovely morning, at 9, to go by foot, from Holland to Belgium. The young priest - he went to finish his theological studies to be like his father, a pastor - he went to see, in the mines, those he called his brothers. Like he had seen them in the Bible, oppressed, ordinary laborers, for the luxury of the grand.

Contrary to the lessons of the professors, wise Dutchman, Vincent has faith in a Jesus who loves the poor, and his soul, full of charity, would have it so, and the consoling word, and the sacrifice: for the weak, the grand fight. Decidedly, decidedly,  Vincent was already a fool.

His lesson from the Bible in the mines was, I believe, profitable for the miners down below, disagreeable to the authorities on high, above ground. He was quickly reminded, rebuked, and the Family Council came together and declared him mad - He was however not put away, thanks to his brother Theo.

One day in the black mine the yellow of chrome flooded in, terrible rays of firedamp, dynamite of the rich, never lacking down there. Then those that crawl, swarming in the coal, say goodbye to life, goodbye to men, without blaspheme.

One of them, terribly mutilated, burnt to the face, was rescued by Vincent. “But” said the country doctor, “this is a blasted man, would take a miracle, or costly maternal care. No, would be foolish to try.”

Vincent believes in miracles, and maternity.

The fool - decidedly he is a fool - spent forty days by the bedside of this dying man. He prevented air from penetrating his wounds and paid for his medication. - Consoling priest  - decidedly he is a fool - he spoke. Work revived the dead, a Christian.

When the wounded, finally healed, descended the mine again to begin his work, you could see, Vincent says, the head of Jesus the martyr, on his forehead the aureole, the gashes of the thorny crown, red scars on the yellow earth in front of the miner.

And me…I am him, - Vincent - tracing his yellowest brush along the wall, all of a sudden:

Je suis sain d’Esprit

Je suis Saint-Esprit

Decidedly, this man is a Fool.

 


Marais - superr cooool.

 

Marais is trendy, upended high end, gentrified bohemian, chic paradise, resplendent with tweed and mesh.

All the locals are looking good. Monasteries and gallery spaces are basically the same thing. Minimalist.

I had been walking in the rain and now in the sun the pavement shone. There is a clarity to the air in February. These rues are narrow. This sidewalk is more so. Wherever there is sunlight there is enchantment. Its angles are acute. There is charm in this.

I like the Marais plenty. It is material and mercurial and everywhere there are beautiful people. Frenchmen graffiti like artistes. Too funny! Frescos and analytic cubism and shit. Angulated cream roses. Nudes! Even the tags on the bridges are tasteful. Mauve and beige and violet jargon for Christ's sake. Not much overlap. Quite gentlemanly bonhomme.

In Europe graffiti has a title like de Balzac. Its title is le Street Art, superr urbain. Chez Dalí, the wallpaper, c'est l'art urbain. Le jour de la Saint-Valentin IS romance alors. But on 15 Feb no love for Faunus. What a has been -->

Paris has unity. It has a standard that facilitates perfecting. Paris is a process of perfection. A confectionary of standards. Stone and cobblestone and catacombs.

After the deluge Paris will be just fine. The Romans christened Paris, Lutetia, built on marshland. Bye bye, Shanghai. See ya later Miami. Arrivederci, Venezia.

Valentine could be any one of three saints. All of whom suffered martyrdom to sell stickers to preschoolers. According to la Dame à la licorne birds couple on the 14 Feb. 

Sextus Propertius loiters by Q.H. Flaccus' book-stall catcalling. Just being an all around nuisance. Wearing snakeskin pants. Frank gets a little Verlaine. There are a parti-color lights somewhere. And Hemingway browses through the Russians on a blustery day. Bookseller is to modernist what  folksinger is to manager. Rock and roll!

I have been an organic farmer and an assistant kindergarten teacher but I have been employed longest as a bookseller. I have been employed by almost sixty-six percent of the bookstores on the Upper West Side. I sell ornamental holiday pickles such as this beautiful specimen to your right and of course Elf on the Shelfs not to mention the infectious biography romance John Quincy Adams, American Visionary as seen on your left.

Sylvia Beach and James Joyce made modernism. This is hilarious and the absolute truth. Jim with his ash-plant walking stick and gentle Sylvia.

Certain critics are career gossips. Having deified certain writers in their youth they now must rectify this travesty by convincing themselves, mind you themselves in the guise of an riveted public, that the lives of these men and women of genius were quite trivial indeed. They sniff and snivel and genuinely drivel laundry lists of minor incidents that would not go over well over drinks let alone over several volumes. It is like a not too topical People Magazine, like a melange of the Théâtre de la Cruauté and friends reruns. Should the genius in question be a publicity somnambulist i.e. d'Annunzio or (better yet!) Mayakovsky then the tactic has a shot. James Joyce embraced life too fervently for laundry lists. Jim lists! Seraphim and moocows.

Ernest composes his Sylvia so gracefully, with such resolute tenderness, one thinks of the portraits Cézanne did of his son Paul. Humanity and craft and heart, whatever that is. Cézanne so moved by his public, now paints with more care.  Made and made of mes petites sensations.

There is the passage in A Moveable Feast where Hem has not eaten and his "perceptions are heightened."I adore this - "All the photographs looked different and you saw you saw books you had never seen before." Anyone who loves reading understand this. I can see the yellow and cream bookends of the turn of the century revealing themselves to young Ernest. Here are the Prose Poems of Turgenev. The Mysterious Stranger. I imagine Hemingway intrigued by a few truly composed sentences. There is the marvelous injunction of Sylvia not to read too fast. Such a kind and unusual farewell.  I wonder if Beach said this to all of her regulars.

MONTPARNASSE

On my way to Montparnasse I made a pilgrimage to the homes of some I admired. There are things that are bound to disappoint one and I have found that former residencies generally do whereas natural landscapes and languages (that includes local architecture and folk music—Thelonious Monk says we all play folk music) are always invigorating.  I think that actually the customary commemorative placard makes matters worse.  Actually when I went to Miles Davis’ house on the upper west side and there was no plac but only somebody taking out the garbage I smiled. Of course 77th street between West End and Riverside is in his name.  Anyway I payed homage in this order to the former residencies of Tristan Tzara, Iannis Xenakis and Gertrude Stein. Tristan Tzara lived near me in Montmartre and his house is an architectural and historical landmark designed by Adolf Loos. As architecture I appreciated it from a distance but I found it underwhelming from the entry or at an angle.  Its features are clustered in the center of the five story residence and the majority of the windows and doors are under setback balconies and terraces in rectangular enclaves. It has a brick lower level and stone upper level. It was kind of tame for Tristan Tzara but if one is to believe Gertrude Stein as Alice B. Toklas’ assessment of Tzara then the house would suit him fine. “Tzara came to the house, I imagine Picabia brought him but I am not quite certain. I have always found it very difficult to understand the stories of his violence and his wickedness, at least I found it difficult then because Tzara when he came to the house sat beside me at the tea table and talked to me like a pleasant and not very exciting cousin.”

 

It is funny to think of the sensitivity of the European temperament to any sort of fluctuation (something like how a Southern Californian deals with the weather anywhere else) and how these if it were not for the tradition (or conservatism as Stein would say) of much of the population then the change that became modernism would have been less persuasive if perhaps more dramatic. From another perspective perhaps artistic revolutions functions like a pressurized system where tradition mounts until boom. Anyways I have a ton of admiration for Tzara. Dada is hilarious. And Tristan after all had a fantastic ear.  Walking through Montmartre in the morning was bracing especially with the climbs and February sun and the cobblestones. I stumbled upon some small parks and courtyards. In the spring I knew I would sunbathe there and read. Iannis Xenakis apartment was in a classy residential building on a side street off Pigalle. It is fun to think of Xenakis surrounded by electric guitars and massage parlors. Arborescent Xenakis, Iannis at sea, evryali, surrounded by souvenirs and knick knacks. The placard reads Iannis Xenakis 1922-2001 NE GREC,  RESISTANT, REFUGIE POLITIQUE, COMPOSITEUR. Incidentally there is no reference to his architecture work with Le Corbusier or his admirable research as a scientific musicologist of sorts. Then there was the long walk down through the 1st arrondissement by the Louvre and to the Seine lined with gnarled, gorgeous trees. I walked over to the Luxembourg Gardens and the small children playing soccer with more facility than most teenagers in the United States. Gertrude Stein lives on the Rue Fleures about ten minutes from the Luxembourg Gardens. It is a scenic walk that many marvelous men and women have taken. The building itself is usual for the neighborhood. The placard reads GERTRUDE STEIN 1874-1946 Ecrivain American.  Gertie would like this.

Walking towards and around Montparnasse the landmark was the Tour Montparnasse. This building is visible throughout the quarter and on a clear day from across the Seine. I photographed how the skyscraper contrasts with the Luxembourg Gardens.

Also I found an instrument store that had an affordable pocket trumpet and a guitalele.