SaMo Shore

JM, SaMo Shore, 7.19.08

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Sur la route avec Guillaume Chérel

Guillaume Chérel

~
uesday night in Venice (where else?) I crossed paths with Guillaume Chérel, who is writing a blog for Le Libération on his own journeys in America exploring Jack Kerouac this summer. That very day he had posted on the episode in On the Road («Sur la Route») in which the narrator picks up Mexican woman on a bus between LA and Bakersfield, the very passage Rodger Jacobs and I were discussing three months ago. g We were on a certain cultural attaché's balcony, near ground zero of Venice (which to my mind is Venice & Pacific), sipping Schramsberg and looking out at the silhouette of Santa Monica Mountains. The attaché's two parakeets kept unusually quiet for sundown; the attaché's guests did not. g Of our conversation, Chérel writes: g Un écrivain ricain de L.A me parle de Kerouac et de Bukowski, puis me sort un truc du genre: «What about Toulouse?» (je ne manie pas bien l’english)… Je me demande comment il sait que j’habite la ville rose, puis il précise: «Delouse !!! »… Deleuze… éh éh… Euh… Rien à battre de Delouze, moi… Ici, les intello-snobs ricains (il ressemble à Régis Debray, l’écrivain de L.A) n’ont que les intello-Français-chiants à la bouche: Delouze, Derrida, Foucauld… Pas BHL, nan… Y’a un truc qui gonfle là-dedans… Et Clément Rosset, par exemple… Y’en a d’autres: j’évoque le terrorisme intellectuel élitiste selon lequel plus c’est compliqué, plus c’est intelligent, subtile. Elitiste. g This is a theme also of the recent book French Theory: "les intello-snobs ricains" fret more about Deleuze, Foucault, et al. than even their French counterparts, and M. Chérel frets about that too. g I remember only bringing up Deleuze to say that both Kerouac and Miller were important to Anti-Oedipus, which seemed to surprise him, but the Deleuze/Toulouse truc du genre was made fairly hilarious by the bubbly. g As it surprises him, now I have to check: in the index of my ancient copy, Kerouac appears twice, on pages 132 and 277, and Miller eight times, often cited to rescue a confusing section. Here's the reference on 132: g Strange Anglo-American literature: from Thomas Hardy, from D.H. Lawrence to Malcolm Lowry, from Henry Miller to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, men who know how to leave, to scramble to codes, to cause flows to circulate, to traverse the desert of the body without organs. They overcome a limit, they shatter a wall, the capitalist barrier. And of course they fail to complete the process, they never cease failing to do so. g The second reference: g The case of Jack Kerouac, the artist possessing the soberest of means who took revolutionary "flight," but who later finds himself immersed in dreams of a Great America, and then in search of his Breton ancestors of the superior race. Isn't the destiny of American literature that of crossing limits and frontiers, causing deterritorialized flows of desire to circulate, but also always making these flows transport fascisizing, moralizing, Puritan, and familialist territorialities? g Of Kerouac's work, M. Cherel admires On the Road, obviously, but does not care much for Big Sur or Dharma Bums. "Big Sur is more belonging to Henri Miller," he says. He is currently working his way through the poems of Mexico City Blues. He likes Visions of Cody quite a bit. g I don't mind resembling Régis Debray...our eyes are similar...although the new left is getting old: Debray is seventeen years my elder...we are in Venice, I need to keep my vanity up...

Moonshadow

I went swimming, only for a few minutes. While I was gone, she sat in the backyard next to the two Moonshadow rose bushes; later I clipped one and gave it to her. We went to dinner on Beverly and she had the pork leg and I had the duck breast; I also had a glass of Barolo. I recognized a face without knowing the name but the people at the next table said it was Sumner Redstone. All day long I wanted to make crème brûlée; I suppose because she had made the first apricot tarts of the year, and I'm competitive. But I didn't before we went to dinner. At dinner there was a small mishap, nothing major, but the restaurant, very kindly, gave us a tiramisu anyway, so there went the idea of having her tarts for dessert. We drove back to Los Feliz. While she found a movie, I picked up some cream. I made the crème before we watched the movie; it didn't take long to make them and they set in thirty-eight minutes. They're now in the refrigerator and I will burn the sugar on them tomorrow. Today was our eleventh anniversary of being a couple. She said that crème brûlée and tiramisu both were from a time at restaurants before we even knew each other. But Moonshadow the rose is not.

apricot

JM, Apricot, 6.21.08


JM, Apricot, 3.9.08


JM, Apricot, 2.23.08


We're going to get about nine or ten tarts' worth of fruit this year. That's about one every six weeks until the next bearing.

Amazingly slow harvest this year, from the first day of summer through now and probably for a few days longer.

Gelato

JM, Gelato in luglio, 7.3.08

Quarto felice; di soggiorno indipendente mai.

A Changing Summer Syllabus

JM, Ojai Lavender Harvest, 6.28.08

lame it partially on Aldine Books. Aldine Books, I found out last week, moved June 15 after about twenty years in the old familiar location. In characteristic Aldine fashion, they left up an illegible map to the new location. I found it anyway. The new location is one block east of Laveta Terrace on Sunset, in a strip mall on the south side of the street. I needed a Fitzgerald Odyssey to continue editing my novel. They haven't unpacked all the books yet at the new location; in fact, they haven't officially opened. There was no Fitzgerald Odyssey. g Whoops: twenty minutes later, yes there was, sparing me some library time. g I've also been recently acquainted with a valuable companion to the Fitzgerald Odyssey: Ralph Hexter's A Guide to The Odyssey, which is specifically about the Fitzgerald translation. g The introduction is filled with useful comparative lit notes: for instance, did you know Virgil dissed Odysseus at every turn in order to bolster the myth of Trojans founding Rome? Did you know that Dante taps Virgil to do the navigating through the Divina Comedia to inspire the same anti-Greek sentiment? Did you know gender issues in Ancient Greece were discussed within the context of disputes among the gods? Did you know (by Hexter's estimate anyway) you can read Homer after studying Greek for a scant year? Have you ever realized that majuscules, a calligraphic feature of illuminated manuscripts, were also included in the first moveable-type printed books, drawn and filled in later? You probably did; all new awarenesses to me, even at age fifty-one with half a lifetime of appreciation of Homer and also of typography behind me. g Majuscules? Large capital letters; one was first used here, ironically, May 12, in my first contemplation of this summer's reading; my own set incorporates my photo of the Shakespeare Bridge. g Hexter is currently the president of Hampshire College; his book is from 1993. He only met Fitzgerald once; I have known some others who had him at Harvard. g Fitzgerald's translation is an acknowledged high-water mark; I'm referring to it constantly as the final arbiter of poetic licensing to my own novel, which takes its title from a phrase in the Fitzgerald; the phrase in question occurs exactly once in The Iliad and The Odyssey. g Hexter is also certainly the first gay-married president of an American college; a fact that pleases me, as I am also drawing much gender studies and queer theory grist from French Theory; lesbianism especially is a large part of my book. g So much for my earlier summer reading list; yes, French Theory is still critical to it and I am over halfway through now, but while in the editing mode, I'm obliged to revisit Fitzgerald and Durrell, with Hexter as Virgil to Fitzgerald. g At any rate, today was the bad day that followed some decent ones. The key decent one was Saturday, when we drove out to Ojai and harvested some lavender. g The bad one today: well, there was much I don't want to get into, as editing the novel occasionally makes me seethe. But also, I went to the Riverside Pool for the first time this summer and found that I barely fit into my swim trunks, which were acquired late last summer when I was at my thinnest weight since turning forty. Swam twelve short laps and was tired. What the hell's going on? g The only scale I trust in the world is at the Downtown Y, and as soon as I got on it I found I weighed διακόσια δεκατέσσερα και μισό. This after two weeks of no alcohol, a trick that ordinarily drops weight for me instantly. Loved the water but disapproved of me. I plan to do more summer scale reading as well.,