Lydia Davis
2003
July
Father goes to look up word in dictionary and finds that he himself has been quoted as reference.
(Word was polysemous and dictionary was Webster's 2nd or 3rd.)
Georges Simenon claimed that he did not use a vocabulary of more than 2,000 words in his Maigret novels.
I begin to tell mother (on the phone) about a nice review the translation got, and she says, "Help yourself. I'm through with it."
(Then I understand that she is actually talking to my brother in the background.)
In the lists of what I read during the evening "Free Reading" activity, in high school, in among the novels was "sheep-raising manuals."
August
Taking refuge in foreign language like leaving home, seeing familiar things through new glasses, connecting with another culture (the aim not always or necessarily being to "read Borges in the original").
In the case of Tom Sawyer, the amusement of reading a very American author transmuted—"Injun Joe" becomes "Joe el Indio."
—and who is there who is not?—
"Well, your face is prettier than the front of that envelope!" he said, pointing. (First compliment of that kind from a man in quite a while.)
A loaf of bread, a dress, and a drawing of a horse - Mother won prizes for these at the county fair when she was a child or adolescent in Iowa.
Urgent early morning telephone call from aged mother: "I just called to let you know that Mars is going to be closer to the earth today than it has been in the past 67,000 years!"
An early road.
Jimmy Carter was a water-carrier when he was a boy.
Can an apple be boring? Can the peel of an apple be boring? Can the peel of an apple be unpleasant and the rest of it (the flesh) be at least pleasant, if not very interesting?
"It is not yet clear how they will straddle these two very different views of the road ahead."
(mixed metaphor on the radio in report about the Middle East)
argue the toss
areas of woods and hills are suitable for Maquis operations.
"You have a small following and it's going to get smaller."
"She would swim ahead of the flames"
(D. about S. swimming in polluted water of Staten Island)
"I want you to write a great big manual of life in general."
(G. B. to me)
E. tells me his son S. took him along in the sailboat "as ballast."
"monkey with it"
happy memories are half painful (says Mother)
a peanut is a legume and a coconut is a drupe.
(add example of pulse?)
time divided into two: present-future (Jesus and dog) and past-never-happened and make-believe. Future and present are merged 1) in Jesus's vision and 2) perhaps in "reality," 3) in dog's understanding: dog doesn't understand talk of the past. Past tense and fiction merge.
Mother holds me on the phone one more second to ask me a pressing question: "Do you think we should give the Elgin marbles back to Greece?"
Let it be over before they know what hit them. (Not going on too long in a written thing.)
hoick
(Vita Sackville-West)
A verb form we could call waitress-past-tense, or waitress-present-tense, as in: "Did you want your salad now?"
for your health: consider a short camping trip -
p's again: a poet and a peasant, a poor man and a personality
(from a TLS review)
A: smart people write clearly; dumb people write smartly.
A: L.B. is like...a fondue fork.
widely spread
(email about loosestrife) (should be "widespread")
She was like a wash cycle - small, delicate, cold.
Mother's mother thought certain of the "new" composers were vulgar - like Rachmaninoff.
(This was when?—in the 1920s, 30s, 40s?)
Turn of the century, in the U.S. - "melon houses," where each melon was suspended in a mesh hammock under the glass roof -
"He'll be away until he comes back..."
(about the rubbish removal guy)
A piece of "nostalgic" farm memorabilia in the paddock of a working farm.
I think I look nice, but I really don't look very nice.
The great boxer (dog) is afraid because a storm is coming, and leans against your leg.
When it goes faster than your mind, your mind can't keep up, and it hits your feelings first, then your mind catches up - it's related to the element of surprise - then you shiver - goosebumps - a form of fear. (Effect of powerful writing)
September
(in bus station cafeteria): "...treated her like a red-headed stepchild..."
Small observations: the floorboards are warm (to my bare feet) where the dog has been lying. (It is a surprise - to my feet - because the dog has just moved somewhere else.)
Screech owl: we heard one last night somewhere outside, at about eight o'clock. Lonely trailing-down cry repeated every 8 or 10 seconds. Called D.A., who knew exactly what it was.
October
Ex. of formation of onomatopoetic word: Gk. pipos, "a young bird," and pipizein or peppizein, "to peep, chirp"
November
L: "I'll take the 12:45 train unless I miss it..."
And now I can: put together the telescope given to us last Christmas.
Vernal pools (formed in forest from rainwater and snow melt, in which creatures can breed without danger of being eaten by fish).
December
Yes - you're a writer - you probably have a lot to say -
(D.S. at MacA. meeting)
Only thing that can stop me receiving that money is my own death. Next year, it will be either that money or my death -
I know I learn a lot more about English words each time I work on a translation. E.g. that "stem" can be used for the trunk of a tree.
(Can hardly do anything without writing about it, so won't be so much of a problem to continue-)
Mother: "Behind every successful woman there's a sink full of dirty dishes."
Continuing to teach, after the fact, I would have the students write down, phonetically, as a limited exercise, the way people do actually speak:
Did you = dje
Do you = djoo
Where zis go?
Sometimes, a momentary paralysis: so many choices, so much freedom
Poem read by Garrison Keillor on the radio had that formula that is so tiresome: prosy, chatty language ("a new long coat you can wear") plus mild metaphors ("as you head into your thirties") plus cute puns ("United" Airline and "Departure" lounge reflecting the couple's relationship) plus the ornament of a more poetic metaphor (the airport's "aquarium lights") and another, but outworn metaphor (winter "baring its teeth"). This is the sort of boring fare to which I infinitely preferred the students' usually rougher but often very nice and fresh moments of prose or poetry.
gwup 'n' get dressed
2004
January
Martha when about eight years old (Claudia six), when asked by C. if she could jump across something: "Sure, heck!"
February
My mother and her mother used to pick hepatica and anemone... These were the first flowers they picked in the spring.
"She doesn't read particularly well, so I don't pay much attention to what she's reading..."
(Mother, on phone, about friend, aged 85)
(I assume roles of (13th century) scholar; farm wife; troubadour)
Every day — sorting. Bathroom cupboards; magazines and catalogs; socks; pens and pencils.
Never say anything unkind to anyone about anyone (beyond the walls of the house) and never be cool or rude or dismissive to anyone...
L.S. on phone advocating importance of D.F.W.'s Infinite Jest — calling it a milestone, that things changed after it.
In Intro to Proust Diary, take care to state that each translation/translator must proceed in a different way according to the demands of text and the personality/training/philosophy/practice of the translator, and that this was simply my particular approach to this particular book.
"She's a very small person—she's the one who fell on top of me..."
(Mother)
"sparrow" < "flutterer"
(radio)
March
Thought it was more mildew, this time on the pages of the book I was reading, — but it was my own penciled notes in the margin
Very interesting etymology of licorice.
Would like to get etymological dictionary of Catalan, too.
The things of nature have their own laws, often mysterious — they present so many puzzles. Whereas for every man-made object someone somewhere knows exactly how it came into being and how it functions.
Mother's title (which I can't use) for my Proust Translation Diary: My Life with Proust or Life with Proust.
Schoolmate remembered that our 7th grade English teacher taught us that "words have meaning."
There they live until they die.
floorboards warm (under bare feet) where the dog had been lying.
They're just using him to shine their buttons
(expression made up by A.)
I give you my clothes
I give you my money
I give you my life
And now you ask for a --- (unreadable)
Having more time now, I:
Will start cooking better meals
Will stop and talk to the neighbors
Will drive down road to things I have only seen from a distance
Will sing in a chorus
Will dance in a group
Have already gone to a ballet
April
"Bill, the son of William Allen White..."
(Mother, how she says these three-part names that impress her)
do they have to kill it to do this?
no, it comes dead
May
Latest of my survey questions:
What is the past tense of sneak?
J.: "snuck" Mother: "sneaked"
The warmer weather makes me nostalgic for a childhood growing up in the Bronx or Queens which I never actually had—
In England - try to "look up" the gentleman who looked out on the titmice in his field?
June
Enhanced Vegetation Management (from leaflet about tree-cutting and branch-trimming operations by Central Hudson power company)
enhanced clearing
enhanced tree trimming
The actual disappointment doesn't compare to the sensuous pleasure of sitting here in the hot car feeling sad.
Failing memory - leave breakfast dishes in sink to tell yourself you had breakfast.
(woman on radio - but did she actually do this?)
Should prepare for my death now - then I can carry on with my life.
Relatives' Ailments
Aunt M. suffered from petit mal seizures and her son, my cousin H., from St. Vitus's Dance.
July
Somehow, owning others' experiences is related to claiming others' things for oneself (I too have a Jewish grandmother, or even, I too am Jewish), and in some way I can't yet define also related to the idea of speaking a hodge-podge of languages.
"Why do you always close the shutters before dark?" the old painter asks his housekeeper, in the film. She ignores him.
He ain't wrapped too tight.
Sun on wash on line.
Her last resting place / behind a piece of bending cyclone fence
cows on the sandy beach
five cows walking along the sandy beach and over the rocks
I am hunched over the steering wheel peering out through a clear patch in the windscreen, as the rain comes down. I am going slowly and veering from side to side in the lane, and he says, "You're not driving with any authority."
with ivory where his left shoulder had been
torn apart and remade by the gods with ivory where his left shoulder had been.
(Ovid)
The young writer is fascinated by language itself and not sure what to do with it. Also fascinated by people and their language and the landscape but not sure what to do with those either.
August
Influences on style: not only the obvious (reading, as one is growing up; classroom teaching), but also, for instance, the style in which your parents talk and write letters; the way the people around you talk, wherever you are living (e.g. the Irish during the months I lived in Ireland).
dreary canary
Don't bury all your banana skins under one rosebush.
(made-up saying)
Don't shine your buttons before you get your uniform.
(made-up saying based on A.'s made-up expression)
work accomplished - a job finished - sometimes throws me into some housework. And housework to excess sometimes worries me so much (how I'm spending my time) that I am thrown back into the other kind of work.
"I thought they were enviable - but they're not enviable - "
(mother, about relatives)
"I developed this bad impression after thinking it over..."
(mother, after visit from relatives)
"It sends the sorrow to your heart."
(Geen's mother used to say) (about sighing - you shouldn't.)
Sitting still at a desk or table trying to apply myself to writing for so many hours of so many days (back in the '70s) - this made my mind work, consciously, and as my mind worked I wrote down anything that struck me as worth writing down (in the notebook).
Dickens was an influence or inspiration, too - but stylistically not possible or close (as Beckett was).
I used (in style) parallel structure, repetition, sets of three terms (rhythm), rhetorical question, precise detail in reporting, avoidance of cliché or the mundane, honesty in reporting, clear-sightedness in observation of physical or mental landscape, wide and precise vocabulary, [faults: overblown, melodramatic metaphor, excessive self-involvement (though maybe that was inevitable)] (writing when in my twenties)
"Our pine nuts are quite old"
Insects - do not have much sense of play - are not very playful
I would have flashes - they would come to me as bursts of revelation - what I could do in the next class
Children taking naps in the kitchen near washtubs covered with checkered oilcloth.
(Local Color)
I like many things about the journal I am typing up (from the '70s) - the only thing I consistently don't like, that annoys me, is myself. ...myself as I appear in it...
"Thanks for jiggling your schedule."
(D.W.)
Ron Carlson's intro to his stories rather useful for detailing how various stories began or where he took elements of them from.
(1972: my punctuation wasn't as good, my understanding of how the natural world worked was not quite as good, same interest in creatures, nature; same liking for the outdoors - many things the same. Very consciously trying to "be a writer" - the urgency of having to prove it (to myself) by doing it. The questions about how to do various things and also larger questions. My metaphors of that time bother me now, like "It is the fruit-bearing trees that are twisted and gnarled, as if gripping the earth stubbornly.")
Those people who seem so lacking, to me, could be called "peopl." Should bad food - what I think of as "recreational food" - be called "fod"?
(My self-absorption then. Still, I appreciated the description of the Beaufort Scale then too.)
Do you think that you could find, in a Patagonia clothing catalogue, the phrase "common decency"?
The focus on self is natural, perhaps, at that age, because I was depending on that self (almost viewed as a separate entity) to be capable of doing what "I" wanted to do. As a singer might fuss over her throat, I would fuss over my "state of mind."
(HHD, about living in Cambridge, in the '40s): R.'s mother would assemble a pot of baked beans and take it to the local baker - he had about eight pots of beans that he baked all day. Every Saturday. Ate them at night and in the morning. H and Pat (first husband) also did that up in Maine. They ate baked beans Sunday morning. Her own mother also didn't believe in cooking much on Sunday - would leave the roast in the oven while she went to church.
Horse would pull hay up to the level of the hayloft (with pulley) - she would ride that horse. She would jump into the hay in the hayloft.
Maybe she likes the idea of walking but does not actually like to walk.
October
Mother died last night, Saturday, Oct. 2, at about 11:40 pm. She was 100 years old and 11 months.
Now I will not be looking for an apron for Mother.
(That is why one is black and blue - keep getting hit by it from different directions.)
Example of accidental repetition: "He walked up the front walk."
November
Fruit didn't seem welcome
(from mother's notes on dinner party)
"As for the wheels, it was cried unto them in my hearing, 'O wheel.'"
"Win a trip to the Laguna San Ignacio Whale Nursery."
"Lecture by Bessel van der Kolk, MD, Professor of Psychiatry, in the anti-stigma lecture series"
(email)
To pass along to the Master Class: to "resee" drafts of her memoir, one writer printed them out in a hideous font to avoid the familiar look of the printed page. Sven Birkerts makes bad, grainy photocopies to defamiliarize the writing for final drafts.
Thought (in shower, of course) about prose vs. poetry. Poem being song, I like the flatness or prosaicness of prose. Want power of language to appear magically through the flat prose; as the complexity of thought to appear through simplicity of surface à la Beckett.
For Master Class: v. good example of complex, effective concluding paragraph of essay: p. 123 Pilgrim. To be analyzed.
Example of effective personification, p. 122, microscope in basement.
December
What did not use to happen before: I look at material for a story, I see how it would be worked, I see how it would come out, and what effect it would have, and do not feel compelled to do it. I see it all laid out before me, I see through to the end of it, and I don't know why I should do it, exactly...
2005
January
Mimi (in 1943) uses the expression "one grandma agin another" in a discussion of child-rearing.
Mother's advice, in letter maybe to student/former student: "Write simply, avoid Latinate words, try to choose active Anglo-Saxon verbs and vivid concrete nouns."
Her ambivalent attitude towards having children: absolutely essential to a woman, yet impossible to do well -
From a card in Mother's papers: "Jessie's mother was 98 on Dec. 6 - not really sick but in bed slowly fading away - "
Brother and sister share parents and all other relatives. First cousins share grandparents on one side. Second cousins share one set of great-grandparents (out of four sets).
The old worries linger on [about mother, now gone]. Worry about her bowel movements, worry about her clothes, worry (just now) that she doesn't get more letters from people - and now, where she is, she certainly doesn't get any more mail.
Nice writing in grandmother Franc's letter: "The rain washed the paved streets and gutters and settled...the dust in the country. The air is cool and clean. The fragrance of day-lilies (pure white) comes in at the windows along with that of ripening corn, plums and grapes."
I wish he would yell up the stairs at me more pleasantly.
Was the Civil War also called the War of Rebellion?
When a question mark stands up too high off the line for the somber mood of what you are writing.
February
"...As if I were some kind of old freckle on the backside of somebody's candy bar... I know, I know, it makes no sense..."
It was the way to Cambridge - now it is only the way to Boston -
Pynchon's language in The Crying: chicks, booze, more; tic of supplying enhancing dialogue verbs - "remembered Oedipa," "squinted DiPresso," "allowed Di Presso," Metzger explained"; "brown-haired lovely": "Metzger leaped"; mix of adjectives: "gorgeous," "imaginative"
Must feel sympathy w/ narrator or characters - and maybe some do feel sympathy (i.e. a kinship) w/ this flip, hip narrator...
The cleverness distances author from character: stresses or reveals the manipulation. Beckett's characters also manipulatively named.
So - complex relationship here between author and narrator, narrator and characters, author and characters, reader and narrator, reader and characters, reader and author. (And author and book, reader and book.)
Vocab: annular corridor; radial aisles; more precision signals to reader that author/narrator (narrator and thus author) is smart and well educated, so can afford to drop more pop cultural references, as to Road Runner cartoons. Proving he is both hip and smart. The intellectual with the baseball cap.
"Metzger challenged."
Nicely handled precise description of action (as p. 77: "gliding off sweating biceps and momentary curtains of long, swung hair")
So - he can write, as we say, but what about his choices of 1) characters, 2) diction of narration, 3) attitude
She gets married and raises a family in order to avoid writing so much
My handling of the language when speaking of her [Mother] seems to matter very much: I must handle it very respectfully and never casually. In the act of writing about her, no reader is involved or at least no reader is thought of. It is solely between her and me, or between the memory or imagined image of her, and me - a private thing. Or, more sadly, involving only me, with no "between." Well, no, the "between" is there, but it is still only between me as I write and her as I imagine her, since she is gone. As for the reader, the reader is necessary for the writing, but not thought of at the moment. The reader is necessary in a deeper sense, because the reader determines the writing - how it will be. The reader has already been incorporated into my approach to writing. How it will be read has already determined how it will be written. Because the reaction of the reader, which is the effectiveness of the writing, has already been incorporated into the approach to the writing.
Pynchon's handling of language - respect for characters - respect for reader. But I left out, before, his relationship to the language itself.
It is the transition from private to public that's difficult.
The naming of the chars. in Crying is the first problem. It says: these are not real, I created them, they are a joke of mine. Genghis Cohen, Stanley Koteks, Oedipa Maas, Dr. Hilarius.
Depressing, gloomy world - but if there are no characters, what is the point?
Also, question of attention to author. Our attention more to author than to story?
The day you leave - when the hotel begins to lose its illusion - the illusion that you are especially welcome, privileged, beautiful, aristocratic, rich, and that you belong to a timeless world, something from the past more than the present, etc. It is all something you pay for, of course, and is only to be had by paying, except for those fleeting courtesies conveyed in momentary conversations vouchsafed in the lobby by employees who do not know whether you are a paying customer or not but who are by nature and by employment on their best, most welcoming behavior...
But now, in the morning that you are leaving, you begin to lose the illusion, you know this room is not really your room but about to be someone else's room, and that the hotel wants only the money, will take your money and forget you.
A picture of a saint, changing well-water to oil...
(Pynchon)
My great-grandfather is my father's grandfather or my grandfather's father.
Oh! Come out nanny-goat, etc.
Psychiatrists need psychiatrists
Downwind of a smelly chili pot
Divesting - easier to reach things out of cupboards
to use slang = to claim belonging to a group
Kafka - neutral German - divorced from other German speakers.
V. used to say that if you put things away where they belong, you will know where to find them when you need them. (I.e. there was a practical reason to tidy up, beyond just the look of the room.)
But when you have located some of your ancestors by name, dates, and places of habitation, and have even sometimes opened a window on their lives and gotten a more vivid look, through a letter or diary, it is all the stranger to have no way of locating others - their sisters or uncles, etc., who have dropped completely out of sight. They are there, but as shadows, ghosts, transparencies.
Henry James walked over to the Parker House Hotel from 102 Mt. Vernon St. for breakfast each morning and then returned to his rooms and wrote until time to walk to Cambridge to join his family (father and sister) for dinner. He would walk back after dinner. A long walk. This was in February 1882.
The simplicity of it seems very good to me.
Nice "time" quote from radio: "The time is twenty-five minutes after the hour."
Twin-Full Jumeau-Double Individual-Matrimonial
(label on Nylon hotel blanket)
March
The full name of the University of Notre Dame is actually the University of Notre Dame du Lac (Our Lady of the Lake).
The very fact of putting something into words gives it an importance it didn't have before
April
Believed in a kind of perfectability of the human body (through diet and exercise, etc.) that I may have to give up...
The only aspect that is "fiction," often, is the adoption of a persona and the tone of that persona, along with, sometimes, an exaggeration of features of my own persona and opinions. But there is a sort of leap there - a real difference.
May
Sidney Brooks's word plash: a shallow piece of standing water; a marshy pool; a puddle
He uses it several times, very casually, as though it were common (1870s). It is a very old word (OED), now not used at all here anyway.
They did not know when they would arrive. (Sea captains in the 19th c.)
tired of chewing this endless salad
thought spring wasn't going to come didn't care if it came
July
Perception, out walking, about tension in the body. I could relax, but there is this actual desire to express some worry with a tightening of the muscles - it is a way to take action, to react actively. Only way to relax truly is to get at the source of the worry.
So maybe I'm cultivating these friends, not out of a desire for intelligent society so much as to make sure there will be enough people at my funeral: a good number to pay attention if I fall gravely ill and to mourn me if I die.
Highly strung (read that even in diary kept in 1915 - one of Shackleton's crew)
My own neatness (in one place in the house) may remind me to be neat (in all the rest)
"relation...of...pot to potter"
(source?)
I should send him a postcard but it's too much trouble -
"Chimneys and fountains, lumps, bumps, filaments"
(K. Waldrop)
Am truly enjoying the Peter Altenberg little stories, though they are somewhat awkwardly translated (a character in late-nineteenth-century Vienna says "No way"). Telegrams from the Soul (I don't like the title either) - Archipelago. How he truly manages to make a complete, and captivating, story out of the most minor and everyday incident.
(I'm finally beginning to read real books again - I needed only to find the right time in the day for it - to read with patience rather than impatience.)
I would like to get the stories in German (and then suggest revisions to the translations).
She was in mourning, and she lost her ability to discriminate and therefore to make anything good. Mainly, she simply said too much about everything - She thought, each time, at least it will be longer.
Very intelligent review of Louise Glück's October in the LRB by one Laura Quinney. Overview of Glück's work with lots of specific points. This quote from Glück echoing what I was just thinking about individual words: "What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word's setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, the word's full and surprising range of meaning."
My observation is not quite the same, but close.
Quinney on E.D.: "It is a poem without any evident humor or variation of tone, yet it is, strange to say, lively and lavish all the same. Thematically it is dark, but rhetorically it is gay. This is due to the extravagance of the figures... There is delight in the play of language." (This about "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers.")
"...of course, I'll miss the fishing..."
(my observation about a single word - that a single word contains an explosion of meaning and history - I was always wary of "history" as a school subject but loved to contemplate a single word.)
The vegetable garden now containing a central aisle between two towering patches of, on one side, fennel, on the other, hollyhocks.
goosey: belonging to or resembling a goose
good-by - ("often used interjectionally")
August
Reusing rolodex card that had Bill Bronk's address on it (sad). Note penciled on back said that he sent me Our Selves in February '95.
Next door they were shouting again: "When did I ever like venison? When did you ever see me eating venison?"
Oh yes, I know what I was going to do - I was going to get out the medical dictionary and look up "post-nasal drip."
Answering old correspondence goes more quickly as I get toward the bottom of the pile, particularly as I come to people who have died in the meantime.
A. says that eating alone in the basement of the Blue-Plate Special is depressing.
Turkish-Jewish-Peruvian
(S.'s neighbor)
Exercise Your Foreign-Language Ability: Take a Dansk class.
(woke up with that one in my head - lame)
Mother - both her nightgowns hanging in the bathroom at the same time. She meets herself coming and going.
Christiana C. (my "pen-pal") writes about the "homowo" festival which is celebrated by the "Gas of Greater Accra region."
Christiana says that "in future" she would like to become either a graphic designer or a policewoman.
Missing her more as the year since she died approaches its end - as though she is closer during this year of mourning (as it has been) and will move farther away once it has elapsed. Today I am wearing another of her dresses - it looks different on me, though, and I sweat a different sweat - or perhaps she really didn't sweat anymore at all.
Such silence - beautiful silence - as one is asleep (it's nine now), and the other is away, the phone doesn't ring, the animals are quiet except for the crickets in the trees outside. The window fan hums, the computer hums, the traffic passes on the street, but the silence in the house throbs...
"I've been realizing that I'm not immortal - and certainly Robert isn't!"
(Mother - May '96)
"She still looks after this family in which two out of the three children have dreadful eczema....The father has motor neurone disease..."
(says C.)
"She has two little premature nephews..."
(says C., or Mother)
Loyalties - royalties
"I was standing still in the Produce section..."
(Kathleen)
"I am a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees."
"Thou shalt not sow a field with mingled seed."
slogan, shogun
Eating fish is something I do alone, for complicated reasons having to do partly with smells in the house. I am alone with a sardine sandwich, alone with a salmon cake, alone with two anchovies in my salad.
Neuroses? But I finished with my neuroses years ago. I don't know if they actually went away or if I just got tired of thinking about them.
Every day is different.
What was that, in the early morning, making noises? Oh, her husband, somewhere in the room.
Everyone seems interested when I tell them I am taking singing lessons.
There is something Zen about folding your son's T-shirts carefully when you know he will just toss them in his cupboard.
About Mother's expensive death notice in the NY Times - that it would have cost another x dollars to include the sentence "She will be sorely missed." (I read it aloud to S. over the phone and he did not think that sentence was necessary anyway.)
Everybody takes all the good hangers here -
dog - when the peppercorns spill onto the floor he stands up in a rather gentlemanly way -
That bowl of cut-up fruit was just too big - I lost interest halfway through -
Like an attempt to understand my mother by exploring her life
V. Woolf, about the "Angel": "If there is a draught, she will sit in it."
It's a good sandwich, but I can't eat it now.
Note from conversation with E.W. (from more than two years ago) about films, evidently, and sheep, among other things. He said that James Laughlin kept sheep.
alter ego = (lit.) "other I"
"I'm sorry I irritated you yesterday, but can you tell me exactly how I irritated you?"
(what I would have said to the doctor)
"Son un escritor rexional: limítome no planeta terra."
(Manuel Rivas, quoted in Brick - language is Galician)
Galician - language from which Portuguese evolved
Even when it is raining, the sky gradually grows light, in the morning.
Story in which explanation of a health plan, for example, is gradually taken over by initials and acronyms until it is virtually unreadable.
my servant Jane
sitting in a uranium mine (as cure for arthritis)
I already had a good impression of him because he discussed the Louisiana Purchase.
(Mother)
I had already formed a good impression of him because of the intelligent way he was discussing the Louisiana Purchase.
I asked her to read the ingredients. "Oh, brother," she said when she looked at them.
It exhilarated her to speak to someone from a wealthy foundation
"She's the residue of a concept - she's not even a thumbprint."
(A.)
September
In addition to enjoying what I, too, may enjoy about something I write, the reader has also the surprise of it.
The first two Christmas carols of the season I hear: one inside the Victoria's Secret store in the mall, the other while on hold telephoning Airborne
Shakespeare's books (his own library) consisted of printed works and manuscripts in English, Latin, French, and Italian.
By the end of the 19th century, about one in six New Yorkers worked in some piano-related job
(NYTimes)
even the woodchuck has a voice, or a cry - a hoarse, inflected, guttural, protesting sort of deep squeal
In 1902, there were 17 million horses in the U.S. and 23,000 cars.
(article on AAA, in Harper's 5/02)
when that plump creature springs straight up a foot or more
(about hen)
sounds: continuous: drone or rumble of airplane overhead
breathy, washy: hum of computer on quiet holiday morning, with intermittent swish in background of cars passing on wet road.
More continuous noises now, because of machines powered by continuously feeding sources of energy.
If you think a hen is a dull creature, you have never seen her spring up suddenly for a crust of bread — you hold out a crust of bread and she gets down from her place on the picnic table and walks to you and then springs straight up in the air a foot or so to take the bread -
You may even become a calmer, better person watching those hens come for their bread.
On a night like tonight, it is difficult for me to believe that I am as old as the people who were my age when I was your age were.
(G. Keillor?)
suffer = let
(Wharton, King James Bible)
The heron's ugly, raucous cry - its croak, when disturbed or taking off or landing -
My mother's particular concerns about language - now, respecting them is respecting her or paying homage, even though I know, and she would probably admit, that language will keep changing.
each other vs. one another
dissect (pron. of)
another was "seemingly" - but E. Wharton uses that
(Motor, p. 103)
Wait, there is something floating in the birdbath! Oh, it is only a reflection of the sky.
Article about deported French children bears out that idea of individual and general. The individual soldier, individual cow, individual chicken, individual child - is harder to kill. Failure of - what? Imagination? - that we can't see that every living thing is an individual.
Reading and typing diary entries from when I stayed in a village near Caen, Normandy, by myself for three days. I had forgotten exactly where it was that I stayed by myself. If someone had asked me if I had ever been to Caen, I would have said No. (By now, have again forgotten - would again say No.)
I'm glad the pupil of my eye is black - it goes very well with my black shirt.
I'm realizing - as I read through old journals - that I never wrote anything casually, everything was very conscious (if not always really well written). From Europe, I did not usually write a letter to my parents or anyone else without first writing a rough draft. Inconceivable to me now.
My parents visited me in Paris in April, 1972. Example of what they were like: On one particular day, my mother was writing a Tanka poem about Renoir. My father's leg was hurting badly because in Italy he had fallen waist-high into a pit in a dark tunnel that he was exploring by himself. Mother was 69, father 64.
October
Tonight - to keep even my wish for privacy private.
My parents - objected to the confusion people make between "verbal" and "oral."
"I look back with fondness at the few times I have gotten an idea."
(D.W.)
I can't remember what was in there - oh yes, it was a banana.
"I'm a comma person, myself," says Lynne.
Bought Svevo's As a Man Grows Older in London, Christmas, 1967.
While chasing butterflies in Yosemite, Nabokov stepped on a sleeping bear.
Nabokov volunteered to put in order the collection of Old World butterflies in Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Nabokov said, of Gogol's The Inspector General in English translation: "I can do nothing with Constance Garnett's dry shit."
Nabokov's main desiderata (for translation): "style and a rich vocabulary."
In the Cambridge apartment they moved into in the fall of 1942, Nabokov occupied one bedroom and Vera and Dimitri the other.
November
Nabokov found Don Quixote crude and savage.
A. asks me if I need anything while he's out, then adds "— and don't tell me almonds."
A depressed-sounding woman by the name of Candy.
A Mohawk Indian who patrolled the German-Russian border during the Korean War.
(I met this man in the Kingston Hospital blood lab waiting room - but A. tells me that particular assignment was not possible.)
Mother - I have read another Dick Francis mystery.
Example of metaphorical origins of words: oval comes from word for egg.
Good example of classical Latin, popular Latin, and Romance word derived from popular Latin:
"spring": primum ver (classical)
prima vera (popular)
primavera (Italian)
December
Nabokov's style: "anonymous clown" (characterizing reviewer of Pale Fire) and "white-hosed moron" (describing matador). Loaded, double-barreled. Giving each part - adjective and noun - its full force.
He eats Cheerios six days a week.
"Flaxseed muffins were given to 50 post-menopausal women..."
(articles we never finished reading)
To Kill a Mockingbird very good example of writing from a child's point of view. It is not a child telling the story. We do not even ask who is telling it. Narrator enters the child's point of view without speaking in a childish voice.
Unexpected image: steam rising from dark, wet tree trunk just after rain stops and sun comes out.
Another letter of complaint: to the Arett Sales Corp., maker of plant sprayer whose nozzle mechanism so quickly stops functioning.
The Mexican jumping beans click around in the plastic box periodically until they fall silent
The "crisp" duck
Good title for piece about my religious grandmother: "I was so sad that you played indoor golf on Sunday."
