in the hall of mirrors

Time: imposed, imagined

Sleeping too much, drifting: probably my thyroid is off again. Since Duisburg: several busy days, mostly administration, and a conference day; a lot of floating anger about promotions, ambition, respect; all among the strange long days of Spring in the far north. Those are the more sharply defined moments in what has felt like a soft, bright fog of vaguely lost hours.

I've been reading a lot of Avram Davidson lately, as I've mentioned. Dense sentences, and a rich, complex experience of time and accident. But behind it all is the lengthy tale of Davidson's increasing irritability, his irascible and uncomfortable old age, his sense of failure, his constant complaining about money and success – all of which sound rather like the way I'm getting with age. Resentment as a way of life, and the entire sense of time as a narrative of not-enough....

And Gerhard and Kunsu have to sell the house in Kreta, and I wonder how they will manage their old age. And Laura will be visiting Edinburgh this month, and I'll get to see her – but will have to answer her questions about how I'm doing, in comparison to her relatively successful, streamlined life. And my eldest sister and her MRIs, and my younger sister and her shaky job security; and my mother in her nursing home. And Trisha battling with her business while setting her poetry aside, and Terry as perpetual freelancer who's currently doing well, but not forever; and A. who has moved in with K., and may be finally settling down at long last; and L.'s new Irish colleen, who is moving here, changing countries for her new relationship. R.'s rather arrogant successess, D.'s dimming prospects. Perhaps it's no accident that these friends-and-loved-ones are mostly in the arts, or academe, or other thinking-oriented lives; it's a tough and unpredictable world to live in. But all these people will get older, more fragile: somebody will need to take care of them – who will it be?

Lives, and time: that eerie sense that we all end up recreating patterns over and over – and some manage to break patterns; and some patterns are more welcome than others. One of the most valuable aspects of the academic and literary lives is reading biographies – that is, reading about people: one becomes very clear that most people who suffer do it to themselves – and most people who fail seem to do it to themselves too, though it's not always entirely clear how that happens. And success is unavoidably a matter of chance, a roll of the die.

It's sort of a fanning-out of my usual anxieties about myself, to think about all the people I know: how they will do now, how they will get through their days, what will they be like when they're older. And a smearing of quantum variations in possible universes: as though you can imagine the whole fan of possibilities opening out from each moment, and what each might entail. As though ambition, anxiety, hope, despair, are multiplied, but not into mere grayness, but into a vast swatch of hues: all pastel though, because the intensity of emotional focus on any particular career problem or a hope is leached out by all of its variations.

Strangely, this makes me feel even more helpless in relation to my life: with all of floating time and possibilities, it becomes even more difficult – no, not difficult: merely implausible, merely rather pointless – to focus on doing something right now, on engaging in some action. One of Tanith Lee's beautiful stories in Tamastara runs through two parallel lives, one of a boy, one of a girl, both with the same soul and born in the same moment; both have joy and great sorrow (the boy a beautiful drone who loses his looks in a bus accident, the girl a dancer who marries without love). At the end the whole story evaporates as the soul moves on: the two stories were parallel visions of what might happen if the soul chose birth then, but it doesn't – neither story happens at all, both are negated into vastness.

This is sort of how my life feels now: sleeping too much, a bright fog: drifting – in time....

334

It is dangerous to read books that have certain moods – especially when they are well written. Your own mood distorts and shifts to match them....

Tom Disch's masterpiece is certainly 334, his intricate exploration of various denizens of an overcrowded, rather listless, declining but realistic New York in 2021-26. It's really a series of long portraits that are linked together behind the scenes, as it were – The Death of Socrates, about a young black guy who struggles to survive, including taking university courses, and finally gives up; Bodies, about hospital morgue orderlies with a sideline in supplying necrophiliacs; Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire, about a social worker trying to negotiate her structured and chemically supported fantasy life with her 'real' life; and, best of all, Angouleme, an utterly eerie picture of a handful of genius children who are going to a school for the gifted that is teaching them almost too much.

All capped by the extended hyperstructured second half, where a complex array of points of view around three women, four sets of concepts and numerous dates scattered across several years are enmeshed in an utterly urban picture of change. Of course it's all rather dark, rather cynical – this is not an end-of-the-world book, but it is about people trapped in the various levels of a dense but drifting culture, in fact the perfect image of a neo-Marxist 'administered society', where no one is really in charge, there are no actual oppressors as such, and yet everyone is oppressed.

Dangerous to read, of course. One starts to look around and see the same bleakness, the same disintegration, the same devolution... although I am always delighted by a favorite, wonderful paragraph from Angouleme, which functions as a sort of phantasmagorical 'false cadence' to a planned murder that never takes place. The gifted children, rather decadently calling themselves the Alexandrians, coming from their school (which has funding from the Balanchine Foundation and therefore teaches dance), take some of the pills that everyone hands around in this era and try to figure out, since their murder plot is now impossible, what to do on a lovely summer day by the docks:

Then, proving that when you're sailing the wind always blows from behind you, they found Terry Riley's day-long Orfeo at 99.5 on the FM dial. They'd studied Orfeo in mime class and now it was part of their muscle and nerve. As Orpheus descended into a hell that mushroomed from the size of a pea to the size of a planet, the Alexandrians metamorphosed into as credible a tribe of souls in torment as any since the days of Jacopo Peri. Throughout the afternoon little audiences collected and dispersed to flood the sidewalk with libations of adult attention. Expressively they surpassed themselves, both one by one and all together, and though they couldn't have held out till the apotheosis (at 9.30) without a stiff psychochemical wind in their sails, what they had danced was authentic and very much their own. When they left the Battery that night they felt better than they'd felt all summer long. In a sense they had been exorcised.

Rich, skilled artistry, a fictional minimalist masterpiece that resonates with a 1970s BAM-style New York, vast performances casually invoked in the midst of chaos, sinister boredom, a drugged left turn away from the everyday – a paragraph that has always startled and amazed me: and one that sums up the beauties and horrors of the artistic life, especially in a center like New York, London, Paris: where all things are possible, but, of course, have their consequences....

Vathek

After a rather long and chaotic day (many undergraduates being foolish – getting distinctly irritated with some of them), reading Beckford's Vathek (and The Episodes of Vathek) for fun, late at night.

My taste for fantasy was established largely by Lin Carter's vast publishing venture in the 1970s, the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line. A lot of excellent books, many of which I still read – Cabell, Bramah, Mirrlees, etc. He published a version of Vathek, and I bought it, and I tried to read it – but couldn't make any sense of it; it was clearly far too adult for me at the time.

Well, I am now (obviously) older. Have come back to this quasi-decadent English classic after many years – and it is indeed well-written, fascinating, even rather funny in a dark way. The heavily perfumed decadence, the amazing antics of the selfish Caliph and his manipulative mother, and of course the absurd trials of his put-upon subjects – and why don't they rise up against him? but that's a very modern, democratic question. And the whole moves at such a strange pace – the careful, ornamented prose is just the vehicle for a headlong rush of incidents and surprises; despite the apparent calmness of any given sentence, the plot pulls you along without stopping. It's almost like reading a more sensual, spice-laden version of the antics of Caligula, Heliogabalus, Nero – it has that kind of twisty I-can't-believe-he-got-away-with-that flavor.

And there's a great advantage this book, written in the 1780s (contemporary with Mozart!), has over the late nineteenth century decadents – it doesn't waste a lot of time advertising its own gothic virtues to the reader: he never goes into boring Parisian ecstasies of how perverse he's being, he just lets his characters get on with it, doing dreadful things to everyone around without a shred of remorse. It really is rather funny.

Of course the ending isn't funny at all: the abrupt revelation that the sumptuous palace Vathek so desires, where he will know all and learn vast dark powers, is also hell – as Borges points out, his temptation is the same as his punishment, which makes for a neater economy than Faust's story. And the brilliant severity of the final, quickly closed door: that the denizens of hell have every shred of hope, love, and by implication joy, taken away from them in an instant – and this is after a period of waiting without being able to escape – that the flames of Eblis which burn their hearts alter them so that they cannot retroactively enjoy any memory of the things they did in life. It's a remarkable idea of hell, and an impressive one.

I see – finally, after years – why this is a minor classic....

Ryman's Air

Reading Geoff Ryman's Air.

I know: it's a bit silly to talk about a book you've only started – I've read about three chapters. It's also the kind of book that is deeply involving; a somewhat dangerous distraction when I've had so much to do – on the other hand many things are done, perhaps I can take a breath for a few days. A book that pulls you into a world... actually certain shows have the same problem, they are too distracting, and working on those two Sondheim shows to finish writing the article was just as emotionally difficult.

However.

The sheer realism of it – and the sense that Ryman has actually gotten much more inside everyday Chinese culture than I ever did, in four years of living in Hong Kong – there is such a sense of understanding people from the inside, and how they understand each other.

And the fear, and the complexity, of what Mae (the main character) is going through – a middle-aged Chinese woman in a tiny village in the middle of Asia, trying to keep from poverty, suddenly faced with the shock of a universal, mind-based version of the Web. Trying to keep her balance between past and present, and an utterly confusing future....

So many passages in this book that make me think: I didn't pay enough attention when I lived in Hong Kong – the memory of walking up one of those steep hills along a street at night, garish streetlights and quiet as it was where my apartment was (sah wan ging, Yee Sap Sam Ho – that was my address in Cantonese, I needed to know it for taxi drivers, including the right intonations). The barking dogs (dogs that had escaped their owners), the eroded tracks, the huge, isolated apartment buildings. The beaches, the hills, the rocks....

Perhaps I'm writing about it to record the reaction to being in the midst of the book: not being finished, not some book review or post-reading reflection; but the sheer vividness of being drawn into another world, and so very well, so honestly.

Christmas Stories

There are some wonderful Christmas stories – they start with Dickens' Christmas Carol, of course. It's a shame that it seems so hard to make a successful film out of it, because it's so overwhelmingly dramatic – but all the many, many versions and adaptations always seem stiff and clumsy when compared with reading the original, which has such conviction and power even in its most sentimental passages. I've always struggled with the other Dickens Christmas books – The Chimes seems so unhappy and grimy, The Cricket on the Hearth so long-winded. Perhaps it's just because I got used to Scrooge at such a young age – I'm certainly not a Dickens fan.

Connie Willis, the wonderful science fiction writer who published a marvelous and eerie collection of contemporary Christmas stories (The Miracle and Other Christmas Stories), lists her favorite Christmas books and movies in an appendix. I'm with her on some of them; there are others I've never read – plus a few surprises by Damon Runyon, Wodehouse, and Auden (I particularly want to read the Morley's 'Tree that Didn't Get Trimmed' and Disch's 'Santa Claus Compromise', but haven't ever found them).

I'm with her on Barbara Robinson's Best Christmas Pageant Ever, which is pretty powerful despite being a sentimental tale for teenagers; and O. Henry's 'Gift of the Magi', which is of course exasperatingly familiar but as strong and expressive as the Dickens. (No, I didn't mean 'as the dickens', thank you so much.) She misses out on some other ones – Saki's 'Down Pens' and Capote's 'A Christmas Memory' should be on that list.

Here are a few that aren't famous, but are wonderful, and should be more widely known: John Arden's strangely blunt play The Business of Good Government, which does a brilliant job of positioning Herod as an intelligent politician trying to keep a status quo. The play gets a bit unfocused towards the end, but has great stuff in it; the finest moments are amazing monologues by the innkeeper's wife, and by the farm girl who sows the field that grows magically to cover the escape to Egypt.

Shirley Jackson's Raising Demons, one of her two books of family life, has a brilliant scene about opening boxes of decorations. Here's an excerpt I cut down to be read at a Gay Men's Chorus of LA concert, by a woman narrator of course:

"I opened the last carton, labeled DECORATIONS.  There on top was the cardboard tree Jannie had made in kindergarten.  That always went on the dining room buffet, and then there was the big Santa Claus face Sally had done in first grade, and that went on the back door, and the red and green paper chains Larry had made when he was a Cub Scout went over the doorway.  Not two weeks ago Barry had come home from nursery school with a greenish kind of a picture of a snowman, and that somehow got established on the refrigerator next to the big chart Larry always made early in December, so we could all fill out our Christmas lists and keep them in plain sight.  Here were the popcorn strings my mother strung when I was the youngest child, and the paper bells Larry and I made when he was so small it seems unbelievable now, and the jigsaw Santa my husband cut out the same year, and the painted candy canes, and the red ribbons, and the green paper wreaths.  "Oh, my," I said, looking at all of it.  "Oh, Mom, just sit down," Jannie said.  "You just don't remember, that's all.  You sit down and I'll do it." "

Then there's Beerbohm's A Christmas Garland, a set of bizarre parodies; they aren't great Christmas texts and many have dated too much (nobody even remembers most of the novelists they parodied), but a few are hilarious, especially the Henry James parody. Neil Gaiman published the brilliant miniature 'Nicholas Was...', just 100 words long, in his collection Smoke and Mirrors. He wrote it as his Christmas card one year; it's certainly among the creepiest and most exquisite retellings of Santa's hideous destiny.

One of my very favorites is the last story in Tove Jansson's Tales from Moominvalley, 'The Fir Tree'. It helps if you already know the Moomin books, and are unfazed at seeing the reactions by hemulens and fillyjonks to the stresses of producing a family Christmas; but the sensible, incredibly Scandinavian simplicity of the ending is a wonderful response to the confused feelings of the holidays.

***

Here is a rather strange script I made out of a combination of the story as told by Luke, and Unplug the Christmas Tree, a cheesy self-help book I found on an obscure shelf in the UCLA library, for the finale of a Gay Men's Chorus of LA concert in 1987. It was read by Ted and Brita, a married couple who were professional actors; the music was an atmospheric arrangement of Stille Nacht by Mannheim Steamroller, which was timed to end about a minute after the last line. I remember Brita's voice reading her part, which was particularly funny – she had perfectly captured the slightly addled, well-meaning but absurd, tone of that self-help book:

F – One letter says, "I live alone and I'm worried about this Christmas. I won't be with my family and I haven't made any other plans." More and more people in this country are living alone. Many of them go home to extended families for Christmas, but an increasing number have no close family or, for a variety of reasons, decide not to rejoin their relatives during the holidays.

M – And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. And Joseph went up from Galilee, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem.

[MUSIC CUE : STILLE NACHT]

F [no break] – There are a number of things you can do alone that you cannot do as part of a family gathering. You can play your favorite music for hours on end. You can eat when and what you want, and generally set your own schedule...

M – And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

F [brief pause] – One man, a hairdresser, told us that his job required so much day-to-day contact and conversation that he relished the idea of Christmas Day alone. He said he saved up special reading material, prepared his favorite meal of fried shrimp for Christmas dinner, and put his favorite madrigal music on the stereo.

M [brief pause] – And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

F [brief pause] – One man with no family got the idea of making some banana bread and taking it around to his new neighbors, whom he had not yet had a chance to meet. He told us that their reception of a strange man bearing slightly soggy, warm banana bread on Christmas Day was heartwarming.

M [brief pause] – And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them; and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them: Fear not; for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

F [brief pause] – If, on the other hand, you want your celebration to be social, you will probably find that you have more options than you may have realized at first. Whether you perceive your lack of family as an irretrievable loss or as a chance to explore new options depends entirely on your attitude. First, redefine your idea of "family"...

M [brief pause] – And this shall be a sign unto you: ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

F [longer pause] – You may know several unattached, compatible people who would welcome an opportunity to gather at your house and spend Christmas with you...

M [longer pause] – But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.

***

In any case, merry Christmas. And yes, that's my tree....

High Spirits

So, in this rather weird transition between the semester and its end (a few meetings left), and also between working hard on the Liverpool presentation and working on the next paper, and having made myself a bit sick in doing so (gastro mostly), and trying to get a list of things done around the house, and sleeping too much in the day and too little at night – I'm resetting myself, bed by 2 am now, and some work out in the world tomorrow afternoon – I've been reading Robertson Davies' High Spirits. For the third time.

A minor book, a collection of occasional Christmas amusements, his yearly ghost stories for the time when he was Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto. I think my eldest sister bought it for me one year, when I was completely excited by his Deptford trilogy – now you see where I first got my idea of Jungianism – and I remember thinking ooh, this will be fun.

It wasn't. I was bored, the jokes seemed drab, the stories dull and academic. I was hugely disappointed the first time through; I must have tried again, on the off chance it had gotten better somehow, a few years ago, and it probably wasn't too bad.

Well, the joke's on me now – I'm enjoying it this time, and have even laughed out loud several times. Which tells you something about me – I've finally reached an age where the humor makes sense (lots of old-fashioned academic in-jokes); the whole is pleasant enough, a bit like Dunsany's Jorkens stories (which somebody or other recently published complete in three volumes, which, yes, it's true, I bought). Very clubby, very cigar-smokey, very casual, but funny in their quaint way...

At this rate, I'll grow a white beard before long.

In praise of Joan Didion

I have always loved Joan Didion's books, especially the essays. In some cases, such as Slouching towards Bethlehem, or The White Album, I care about the subject of the essay; but in Miami, or Salvador, I don't – yet it's the sentences that are always so amazing, so eerily short and blunt, yet so utterly perfect. Almost as though there's no translation between her and the words – something M. F. K. Fisher also manages at her best (in The Gastronomical Me, which is among the finest and most honest of autobiographies).

I've had Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking on my shelf for a few months, a little unwilling to pick it up; it is her book about the year her husband died and her daughter nearly did, twice, and so I knew it would be pretty grim. Given that Didion is pretty grim anyway, I was a bit worried about reading that one; as you might expect from my background, there are plenty of books on illness, death, loss, mourning on my shelves, but I wasn't certain how this one would be, or whether I was up for reading it on any given day. So I opened it Friday evening, rather sleepy, and read until dawn, finishing it around 7:30 am.

Well, it's very beautiful, very perfect. Not because it was calculated to be that way: there is a sense that this is the finest artistry, that of being completely clean and honest – even the ending, when she admits she doesn't want to end the book (and I didn't want to stop reading it), doesn't manufacture a neat or pat or symbolic closure to its shattering experiences; and it doesn't do some sort of nihilist/modernist tailing-off, either. It feels very fair and real, and as though she wrote it while thinking: what would John have felt was fair to him, if I'm going to write about his death?

It was certainly a terrible time for her – it has always been clear that she was dependent on him for stability and optimism, that her own tendency towards fear, fragility, and depression would have overwhelmed her years before if he hadn't been around. And in fact this book tells a bit more of their daily life together (of which little flashes had appeared in previous books, occasionally) and how much they worked together, spent practically all their days, even most of their hours, together: in the early pages I couldn't help thinking, oh no, there's no way she'll be able to keep writing now that he's gone. (I was never interested in his writing – John Gregory Dunne: a guy's novelist, the thinking-person's end of the best-sellers – but for me he's always been that wonderful man who keeps Joan Didion going, which is enough for me to care about him.)

But there's also a clear sense, which even comes out of her prose towards the end of the book – though I wouldn't say it to her face – that she's internalized him enough to continue, in her seventies and however much longer she lasts (may it be long), thinking and writing, almost as though he's not gone at all: she may miss the daily talk, the exchange, the proofreading, the argument, but she'll keep going, almost as though he's right there the whole time.

Good for her.

Abandoning responsibility

No problems with my liver, and my blood counts were absurdly good (697 T-cells – literally the highest number I've ever had, in fifteen or more years of testing them), so the weakness I've experienced (plus all the usual gastro problems) the past two or three days must all be 'transitional' side effects.

What's been interesting has been the extent to which I couldn't do anything – the tingling, woozy feeling that leaves you really unable to get up at all. It's sort of lovely in a weird way – you really can't pay any attention to anything, so, well, you just don't.

I've mentioned Byatt's Possession a couple of times; I remember thinking about illness and shock a lot while reading it – the major nineteenth century female character has an awful shock (this is before she's pregnant, I think) and needs to take some months to recover. It's a very different definition of illness, as well as stress or trauma, than we would use now: the idea that when something awful happens to you, you need a long stretch of time to get over it – without responsibilities, without anything but rest. A very eighteenth/nineteenth century attitude, and one that I'm sorry we've lost – I know that even after the worst things in my life, I've had to get back to work somehow, just to pay the rent of course.

Worse than having to work, though, was the separation of the psychological and the physical – this is the "it's all in your mind" mechanistic critique of illness. The idea that only when something is physically (i.e. mechanically) wrong with us do we need time off....

(PS: No, I don't look like the Ingrés. It's meant to be funny. No, really....)

Against junk; and a small panic

I'm bothered by the amount of junk in my life – by which I don't mean anything that Bukowski or Burroughs would talk about – but more like what's meant by junk mail, junk television... junk yard dogs. Well not exactly that last one, but you know what I'm saying.

Over the years my reading has drifted back and forth – from the kind of reading where you really engage, where you learn something and think and get involved or excited, to something more passive. I have a great many books – about, let's see, twelve bookcases in the house (plus seven at work), all about three feet by six or so, plus about another bookcase's worth stacked in the storage room. So, for years, there have been masses of texts available to me – in fact, that's how I live: from the rich density of the shelves I casually call 'philosophy' (actually philosophy, cultural theory, semiotics, all that kind of stuff) through the delicate sophistication of the shelves of poetry, which have grown to be a substantial part of the whole, to the vast shelves of massed literatures, which run from the complex and intellectual (which are, frustratingly, often also depressing) down to the relatively vapid.

Unfortunately, although I used to graze over a wide range of these books and not worry too much about whether any reading habits were good for me or not, a distinct decline started in the mid-1990s, when I was living in a miserable apartment building in San Francisco, one full of druggies and people on the edge of homelessness, and bashing my head against the concrete wall of finishing my dissertation. The second stage of this decline has been here in northern England – in the wake of the frustration of being rather unceremoniously dumped here by circumstance, and the lack of people around to talk to for too much of each day, I've tended to read only what won't bother me – i.e. what won't challenge me, and what won't be too depressing.

(Finding something to read that's 'not too depressing' can be pretty tough, too – it's amazing how much fine writing tends towards tragedy and disaster; one of the many reasons I love Byatt's Possession so much is that it has a gratifyingly happy ending. And one of the reasons I so hated her Still Life is that the favorite character, the one sensible person, just when she decides to go back to school, has a refrigerator fall on her. I mean, really....)

An even more problematic habit is an increased indulgence in repetitive, predictable television: favorites include CSI and its offshoots, Simpsons, South Park, the various Law & Orders – not such a bad bunch I suppose, but I'm not watching for the detail, I'm just watching to pass the time. Passing time, wasting time, killing time: the edginess of those phrases recalls a scene in that most wonderful of children's books, Norton Juster's Phantom Tollbooth, when Tock, the dog whose body consists of a large clock, reacts angrily to Milo's excuses about his own listless, pointless wasting of time.

Not to mention junk food – I'm feeling especially guilty over this; after various rather hard and largely successful work from Monday to Thursday, I ordered two pizzas and ate them over about a twenty-four hour period – how ridiculous, and what a poor idea from several angles (one of which will come up below...). And then felt lousy, of course. And then there's those long winter sleeps, and the deadly temptation of computer solitaire....

I did grab Barthes' New Critical Essays off the shelf – an essay collection being an easy and often even fun way back into a thinking literature; it's a bit hard that the first two essays are on subjects I don't know well (structuralist interpretations of La Rochefoucauld and the Encyclopédie, all very French of course); but I did get a certain intellectual alertness from them, almost like the mental equivalent of breathing eucalyptus oil. And I put away the books that had been on the table – a long, probably well-written but entirely unimportant novel compendium by Jack Vance (Alastor) and one of Juan Goytisolo's more bizarre pseudo-literary parodies (A Cock-Eyed Comedy, where he makes a strange tour de force out of combining Catholic hagiography and gay pornography). Okay, neither of those is exactly dumb – but they're both really intellectualized timewasters, and my whole point in reading them was to do, basically, nothing.

***

All this has gained a bit of urgency, because I'm suddenly not feeling very well – Wednesday I had a beer with the guys, and ended up exhausted and toxic the next morning; and the past two days I've been sleeping all day, with various weird muscle aches (not flu I think), frequent headaches, and darkened urine – not to mention the burst of zits in unexpected places over the past few weeks. All of which suggests liver problems, one more time: I see the doctor next Friday, and am wondering if he will get dictatorial again – forbidding me vitamins, blood tests every three days, and such. V– and I discussed it over lunch – she also has liver concerns, and heart concerns (her surgery delayed yet again); the slight oddness of trading anecdotes about chronic illness over lunch was ameliorated by the sense of mutual, hard reality: we both seem to be more willing to consider bad futures for ourselves than the people around us, and we both usually try to plan ahead for the consequences (it's one of the reasons I love her so much). This is also why my ridiculous pizza suddenly looks so bad in retrospect: for an ailing liver, the fats and preservatives in cheese and sausage are obnoxiously toxic. No help when you're trying to not get ill.

It worries me (my eldest sister says I worry too much – she's probably right, but that's not something that's going to change any time soon). It's almost like the way they used to explain the power of the ending/climax of Miller's Death of a Salesman: that because he seems to be so happy in the next-to-last scene, his death is that much more poignant – if something awful is going to happen to a character, make them optimistic, or resolved to improve their lives, first. Sounds like that damned refrigerator, doesn't it?...

Anti-Goethe

Reading, for fun (yes, I should be editing those articles instead), between sneezes (I still have a cold), Beerbohm's wonderful essay 'Quia imperfectum' (1918) from And Even Now. Far funnier and more charming than one would expect, given the topic – which purports at first to be unfinished artworks, but which ends up being Goethe. And not just Goethe, but something which makes me, once again, fall into that adoring affection which so many Beerbohm fans experience – it is a beautifully gracious debunking of Goethe, a deflation kindly masked as an apology for that greatest of pomposities, that most patronizing of purities, that noblest of bores.

What is so wonderful about this is that so few other writers seem to have dared to point out what I have always acutely felt, that Goethe is indeed an extraordinary bore. Germans, of course, always place him with Shakespeare, Racine, and so on; and even those who don't seem terribly interested in the man never seem to feel on firm ground in being critical about his writings. But take the obvious books – the first part of Faust: a crazed and fantastic mess of scenes, some very strong but not very natural, all driven more by concept than real dramatic sense; or the second part of Faust – no, I don't get it either, and clearly nobody does. The poems? Snore. Werther? A faddish tangle of adolescent irresponsbilities. The travel writing? That always seems more about Goethe than about anything he looks at – one constantly has that smoothly vain feeling of, Oh how much nobler this scene is, now that I, the Great Man, have gazed upon it.

Recently I actually tried The Elective Affinities, as the ideas seemed so interesting – but it is far too heartless: throwing different types of people together, writing about their cross-relationships and crossed affections, assuming that type attracts similar type (and how unperceptive, how emotionally clueless, is that!?), and treating their losses and miseries as though they are all animals in an experiment that has yielded potentially useful data.

No: he's a bore. And I don't think it's just about language, either: okay, so, Faust is incredibly difficult to translate without making it sounding ridiculous; and although my street German works well enough, I cannot for the most part read dense German prose. But even with Rilke, Celan, Morgenstern, I can get a sense of the beauty of what's going on, even if I understand only a small percentage of it – not, though, with Goethe: it just seems to keep going, on and on, perfect in structure and empty of surprise, chug chug chug chug chug.

I suppose Max said it better, as he always does: that "a man whose career was glorious without intermission, decade after decade, does sorely try our patience". So: maybe, for Max as well as for me, this is merely envy....