singularities

And I am SO enjoying my seminar in Modernist Singularities! We lingered over Beckett and Borges, and last time, D.H. Lawrence (why do we have to say D.H., not a lot of other Lawrences I would be likely to teach, it's not like T.J. Clark, or T.S. Eliot, because there are after all Kenneth and George)
anyway, we have coming up Thomas Bernhard (speaking of difficult people, and I LOVE the Loser, about Glenn Gould, well, I love anything about Glenn Gould), and Wittgenstein (as in his Zettel)  -- will I show, as I sometimes do, Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein? -- AND Marjorie Perloff together, thinking of this and that, and her Vienna Paradox, and then everyone talks, instead of an exam, about what they all wrote their long paper on and if I can remember it, I bring some wine and crackers
and we are growing, Boyce and myself, basil and tomatoes, on our indoor ledge and it looks like a Blooming Forest of green!

what we say...

It is feb. 13, and I expect I have to write this because I can type less and less well, and want to do an update on my blog, which rarely I write - swamped like everyone, and seeing out over it less and less well -- to say, quite simple, just that. Thinking of the ironies of everything -- how fortunate we all are who are still living in such relative ease (we are, after all, alive) -- and how from very littledom, I used to wonder over the dreadfulness of singers losing their voices after a certain age, ballerinas losing their step even earlier, thinkers growing dull of mind, and all that -- now I find this sort of funny.
Last week, I held up my left (thanks be, my LEFT hand) hand to my daughter Hilary and said: look how my two little fingers are curling over. Typing is more worrisome: I was always chaotic, and my typing and writing even more apparent than my uneven stacking of books on every free surface. But there is much I want to write and may not get to it, which is, of course, always the case for every single person I know, or just about.
Many strange things occur and you think: ah, I must write this down so as not to lose it. Like Virginia Woolf saying write it down, or like water, it flows away. (Surely, she said it a whole lot better, but nowadays I just have to SAY IT.)
Teaching: I love sitting around with a group and all talking about what we have just discovered or rediscovered. I loved my seminar on Anxieties of Modernist Representation last semester, and my Energetic Aesthetics this semester and will be delving into the kinds of Modernist processes we might examine next semester.
And my friend Marjorie Perloff is coming to speak for the Henri Peyre French Institute on March 19 on Paul Celan, and I leave the next day to do a Night Museum
What mostly is useful to write? not book reviews, I think, and probably not articles. As for books, I still long to write about my grandmother, whose grandmother kept slaves, who was herself a super painter and being and my agent says perhaps if it turns also into a memoir -- but there is such a discrepancy between her looming talent and energy and communicative personality and whatever I muster, forget the curling fingers anyway. Maybe. And so much else I long to do and write and be and love.

rum and ginger beer

ao when you get up at, say, 2:30 in the morning almost always, and you want to get up again for the whole day at 7:45 at the latest because you want to swim , well, aquacize with your friends, you are about 8 or 9 in all, and this happens lots of times per week, WHAT, here  is the leading question, do you drink?oh yes, frozen vodka and grapefruit juice, etc., but have just discovered that Key Foods (yes, Key Foods, like one block away from me, I HATE grocery shopping and Boyce LOVES it but this is  a block and I can manage a block (but we are about to leave for France, as in our cabanon in the middle of a field, and you have to DRIVE 2.5 kilometers to a village to get anything)
so anyway, Key Foods has Goya ginger beer, at $1 which is a perfect price for anything so good, and you can put rum with it and be Totally HAppy, I mean of course if you forget our friends like Ann and Pat and Hanna not being here any more and others losing their noggins (but then, me too, or why else, when Boyce was so desperately ill all last months in various hospitals, would I lose my credit card, my transportation card, my office card, my library card, you know, all my cards?)
anyway, so here I am about to read yet more stories of my friend Lydia Davis, whose Collected Stories I have, who just won the Man Booker
now i have these friends like Lydia and like Alyson, who just win prizes all over, like Alyson's translation prize and has been my friend for hoever many years
so I get to read (like some theses I am "directing" which for me means reading and saying wow golly gee, directing is a sweet nonsensical verb but there we are
and I miss Isabelle (can I see her this summer?) and Alyson I h ope to see and have my friends here, of the younger variety like those, like Lee and like Charlotte, oh am I lucky or what?
My close friend Hedda Sterne lived to be, and gloriously so, 100, and I have all her notes, and am giving everything, notes from her and Char and Bonnefoy and Jacqueline Lamba and Derrida and Henri Peyre and others I loved and love, but i haven't mentioned Carolyn Heilbrun, who is there and there and there, and yes, her notes
to the Beinecke at Yale... will anyone read them? after I am gone, they can read some, like Jacqueline's -- why have I sealed them off??? -- to read them is to see why
things you can't, I can't, talk about

how it is when you are, like me, given to wanting to have meals or drinks or coffee outside in cafes, and you go, as I did, on my way to deliver YET AGAIN invoices to be paid from the various (oh so many) writers I used for my Modern Art Cookbook, about to come out in September, and did they get the wrong addresses so they couldn't askBetty Fussell and other foodwriters to review it , funny, but my really great and reachable friends like Frederic Tuten and Marjorie Perloff and Wayne Koestenbaum to pitch in And They Did, anyway, on my way to my friend who is going to help me pay all the invoices

and a Frenchman, now I love to speak that language, and I love to eat outside and I was at Isabella's on CPW and there he was eating a crab cake sandwich ($19 so I didn't have, I had caesar salad, $9, and a rose -- hey, it was chilled and lovely and good) and we entered into converse and he is from Chamonix and was saying how grand out NY is and how friendly and I alsmost burst into tears but didn't, and it made me happy... too many bursting into tears over my beloved Boyce in various hospitals this last month, and AM I HAPPY he is alive oh gee whiz

should pack up for the night, well the morning, whatever people say at this delightful hour of the whenever because no one interrupts you and it is like an extra life
and we get to see Matthew tomorrow for lunch, any day we see Matthew is an Extra Day like when we saw Matthew and Hilary and Jonathan (who got me to write an occasional blog in the beginning), quels really grand chilluns, or what?

don't you love Wittgenstein's saying, as his last words, "Tell them (my friends, some put in, but you know he said just "them" -- correct me , but I think it was "them") I've had a happy life"