June 2020

I'm late this month. There's a lot going on. It's the end of the school year, and my oldest is graduating from high school on Friday. At the ceremony all of the families will be sitting in the parking lot in their cars and the students will be called out one by one to go up and receive their diplomas. While I always found these ceremonies anti-climactic as a young person, as a parent this is all a disappointing way to end the fifteen years of school and the rest of childhood that we have just gone through, especially as it is the first kid.

I'm pretty much out of the way of the riots so far, which is good for me, because I don't find them exciting or think they are likely to result in bringing about the re-ordering of the world that everybody claims they want. I am not opposed to a less oppressive police presence or fewer people in jail, but as I have said before, there are huge conflicts between what different segments of the population consider to be acceptable behavior, and how much of the unacceptable behavior the less tumultuous people can endure however noble their intentions are, which is why, in spite of 90% of the educated portion of the population and all of the major corporations and universities supposedly being in ferocious agreement with the reforms being demanded, I believe that these problems will inevitably recur. But nobody wants to hear my opinions on these matters.

A List: Chretien de Troyes--The Knight of the Cart.................................….59/96

B List: In between books

C List: Laurens Van Der Post--Jung and the Story of Our Time...………..53/276

More Arthurian romance that I am not that into. I guess the repetition is helping me learn the stories.

Laurens van der Post (1906-1996), a Boer native of South Africa, was evidently a pretty well known and well-connected guy in his time, being a writer, television host, soldier, conservationist, advisor to the British government, friend of C.J. Jung, Prince Charles (he is Prince William's godfather), a Zulu chief with a very long name that I am too lazy to spell out, and too many other notable friends and titles to miss. His book, which is a memoir about his friendship and encounters with Jung, is pretty interesting to me so far. Van der Post, who appears by his biography to have been an extreme man of the world, in his book expresses what is to someone in our age an odd conviction in the significance of dreams, and of trying to attain a non-material understanding of the phenomena about us in the world in general, particularly though their mythological or "primitive" interpretations. Jung has thus far only appeared in one episode, in which he does appear to have been an unusually tireless, imaginative and questioning thinker of the sort that drove the narrative of European intellectual history for so many centuries. When Jung was in Africa on one occasion he apparently was so taken by the primitive energies of a tribal dance that he joined in with the dancers, but then, becoming persuaded that there was a demonic influence at work in it, he began to crack his whip in the air all around him and roar at the other dancers to desist and go away, which they eventually did. I'm not sure how much patience the modern academic crowd would have for these types of behaviors, interesting and brilliant as he was. 

I am trying to get a post up on my other blog, which has been idle for a while. I'm having difficulty finding the time to do it, and it is hard to avoid going off on a tangent about current events as well.

This month's pictures are from various places around New Hampshire I have been to lately, some are at White Lake in the White Mountain region, some are at the Sculptured Rocks near Bristol, and some are in Enfield.

June 2019

A List: between books
B List: between books
C List: Perlstein--Invisible Bridge...………………………….530/810


For the A list I am actually trying to translate a few pages of The Republic. When I began this list 25 years ago there was a provision, the idea being that I would eventually learn all of the major European literary languages, that specially excerpted passages within the test would be subjected to a second reading in the original language of the author. As is often the case, after starting out I'll say all right, I have gotten weary and am just plowing through the phrases and tenses that are completely unrecognizable to me. In Greek my remembered vocabulary just is not big enough at this point to do a passable job on this, I have to look up almost every other word, and I never mastered all of the little enclitics and other small common words. Yet since I did once study it and still have all of the lexicons and grammars, I feel obligated whenever it comes up to go through the motions of trying to read it. I also do this for (in declining order of reading competence) French, German, Norwegian/Swedish, Italian, Latin, and Spanish books that come up. I have given up trying to read anything in Russian and Hebrew, in which tongues I have no foundation whatsoever, nor any Asian language that may chance to come up--a handful of Chinese and Arabic poems have appeared on the list. It is admittedly for the most part a pointless exercise.


I am working on my next report for the B-list.


There is still some interesting stuff in the Perlstein but I'm not sure it needs to be as long as it is. There is a real book in there, and perhaps this is a matter of where the author's true understanding or expertise lies, but a good deal of the information thrown at the reader in this book seems tangential and doesn't hit the mark. One thing I am stunned by in recent pages was how inept security was at the highest levels of government in 1975 compared to how fanatical and thorough everyone with anything to protect is about it now. While having two potential gun-toting assassins get within point blank range of Gerald Ford, who was the president at the time, within the span of a couple of weeks, is crazy enough, my favorite story is the one about how the presidential limousine crashed into a teenager driving a Buick at an intersection in Connecticut because the Secret Service people "forgot to close the road off." People's brains were evidently not focused on extreme policing, at least in everyday life, in that era. It doesn't seem now like such a terribly hard thing to get a grasp on.


I am a little distracted right now because I have two old cars, both of which should be replaced but I am going to try to get away with replacing just one at the moment. As somebody on the internet might say, and in fact just said today, perhaps I should worry about doing something to stand up to the United States government in the name of all the people it is continually raining death on and keeping in disgraceful poverty around the world instead of thinking about acquiring another environment-destroying machine to transport unconscionable quantities of meat around in. Can you imagine what everyone would say if I suddenly stopped being me and became an impassioned activist?

I haven't been overseas in 18 years. I would like to go somewhere. Nice and the Riviera, I have got into my mind as being a good trip. Crowded, but I've never been there and there is plenty to do. I spent half an hour trying to find a picture but I couldn't find quite the thing I wanted so I am giving up. 

June 2018

A List: Edith Wharton--The House of Mirth........................................256/347
B List: Between books
C List: John Steinbeck--East of Eden...................................................215/601


While Edith Wharton is a capable enough writer, she is also very much after the manner of Henry James, albeit without some of the density, and I find that going deeper into her oeuvre, at least at this stage of my life, is bringing diminishing returns with regard to pleasure. This book is in much the same vein as The Custom of the Country, and both of these share an obvious bloodline with The Age of Innocence, which I remember writing some complimentary things about at the time I read it. This one is probably not bad for what it is, I just am not finding it to be interesting at this time.


Now East of Eden, on the contrary, I am enjoying a great deal. Remarkably, I had never read any Steinbeck before, even Of Mice and Men, which is still widely read in the schools. This is the kind of book that I was raised on, so to speak, in my earliest forays into literature as a teenager, and it is comfortable to me as far as pace, length, character development and so forth. Whenever I take it up (so far) I never fail to find it interesting, nor do I find myself falling asleep or my concentration drifting when I try to read some in the evening, which is an increasingly important consideration. So it is always exciting to have a book like that going, especially when it has some claim to being a classic, even a minor one or one with a lot of contingencies attached to it. I hope it keeps up.
It's hard to believe that a little more than a hundred years ago central California was barely inhabited. I have never been to California. I still imagine I will make it out there someday, but the years keep going by and there is no real opportunity to take that trip in sight anywhere on the horizon.


One more week and I will have gotten to the end of what has been a very long and particularly grueling school year, after which I'll have 2 1/2 months to try to recover and get ready to survive the next one. Only two more years until people start going to college. Having done essentially no planning for this, as was the case with myself as a youth, though in a somewhat different time when getting through a regular college experience was still reasonably manageable for a middle class person with by traditional standards adequate academic credentials, I can only imagine what that is going to be like.

A lot of pretty girl pictures this month. We should try to include some more serious, or at least artistic pictures too.

The character played by James Dean in the movie is still an infant at the part I am at in the book, which I think bodes well for my continued interest in the story.

America.

Expanding on the June Update

I was overtired the other night when it was due and in my haste to slap a few sentences together and get it up I made a sloppy posting. I was (probably) especially unfair to David Eisenhower, whom I described as an unmanly prig. In truth his account of himself as a young person reminded me of myself, if my grandfather had been the president and I had been as a general result of that association a few rungs higher on the privilege ladder. As a result of this I actually have some sympathy for him, as I am sure whenever he has had to engage with really accomplished or powerful men even from an early age, that they have taken their measure of him largely by way of comparison with his grandfather, by which he could not help but come off lacking. In pictures of him as a young man he comes across as an unthreatening, slightly dorky, rather complacent guy, which also irritated people. His wedding to Julie Nixon, it is sometimes claimed, inspired the angry Creedence Clearwater Revival rock hit "Fortunate Son". Most of the people I knew growing up (apart from my grandparents) despised Richard Nixon, in some ways on a more intimate and impassioned level than that of the hatred that people feel for the candidates in the current presidential race, and as such young David Eisenhower's connection with that family, in addition to his blandness and lack of a distinct and strong personality, I would imagine negatively affected his popularity and esteem as well, especially with the more rebellious element of the 60s generation.

Dwight Eisenhower, the President, comes across here mainly as an old guy who is used to being surrounded by people whose existences revolve around doing what he tells them to do, which of course is what he was. It's all very matter of fact, there are no complicated intellectual motivations or gymnastics involved beyond the circumstance that Dwight Eisenhower assumes leadership and the giving of directions in his interpersonal relations and assumes that the other person will fall in line. I would be curious to know more about his upbringing in Kansas, because in addition to himself two of his brothers achieved substantial success as well, the one being described as a millionaire and the top lawyer in Tacoma, while the other was a college president (Johns Hopkins) and foreign policy expert who held significant positions in politics during Franklin Roosevelt's administrations. The family is always described as being poor, yet these three sons rose to positions of great eminence. How does this happen?

Oh dear, I am getting tired again. President Eisenhower was pretty old-fashioned in his beliefs, He certainly did not believe, for example, that as a general rule women were capable of running affairs and governments.

David Eisenhower, as noted above, married Richard Nixon's cute daughter Julie in December, 1968, about a month after my parents, who are also roughly the same age, Unlike my parents, David and Julie are still married now, and even appear to still like each other, which would make them the only young-married Baby Boomer couple of that era that I am aware of to have achieved that distinction. Here is some footage of the wedding:




Apropos of nothing, here is the report of the wedding of their nephew (and Richard Nixon's grandson) in 2010. Besides themselves, among those on the guest list were Henry Kissinger, Rudy Giuliani, Ed Rendell, and the ubiquitous Hillary Clinton. Despite their notoriety, the 1968 wedding looks to have been a fairly modest and low key affair--Julie even looks like she went light on the makeup, which especially for a Republican is astounding. I assume that Dwight Eisenhower earned a decent income by the time he left the Presidency, but, having been a military officer most of his life, he certainly never developed extravagant spending habits, and other than wintering in Palm Springs, his retirement routine on the farm in Gettysburg strikes the modern follower of politics as almost banal. David Eisenhower went to Exeter Academy and Amherst in the 60s but apart from this his mode of life did not seem that removed from that of middle class people of the time. My point being that all of these people of this class either seem to have a lot more money now, or they are employing it more shrewdly to distance themselves from the mainstream of American life. Probably both are at work here.