Somewhere in the archives of our family photos is a shot of my brother and me when we were quite young (four and six?) playing in the snow with a couple of girls.  One, the girl my age, was Amy Doak.  I got to know her a little when we got older and started to go to boy-girl parties, but she had no interest in me and soon got snatched up by an older guy.  Her sister, who was a year older than my brother, was named Annie, or maybe we called her just Ann.  I don’t actually remember playing with the Doak girls, just hearing the family say that my brother and I did that when we lived on Bucknell Street, and they lived nearby.  I don’t blame myself for not remembering.  It was 74 years ago.

The next thing I heard about Annie—except for the kinds of rumors you hear about older teenagers—was that her name was now Dillard, and at the age of 28 she had published a hugely successful, Pulitzer Prize winning book entitled Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

My first reaction, I’m sure, was envy.  I had written dozens of stories by 1974, none of which had been published, and was engaged in writing a novel, waking up every morning at 4:50 and writing for ninety minutes before I went off to my job teaching English at a secondary school.  The novel also didn’t get published.  You might think I’d be a big-enough person to put such feelings aside and read the book, even if I didn’t remember playing in the snow with her.  Just from the standpoint of curiosity: wouldn’t I want to read the words of a Point Breeze[1] girl who had made the big time?  But I wasn’t a big enough person.  I was petty and ambitious and envious.  I didn’t want to read the spiritual ruminations of a woman about a creek (or as we said in Pittsburgh, a crick).  I wanted to read fiction.

What nobody seems to mention about this deeply spiritual person is that she apparently had an affair with her creative writing teacher.  She married him at the end of her sophomore year, and I don’t think he chastely proposed before they had ever touched each other (especially not if those rumors Stan Hahn told me were true).  They were together for ten years and then amicably divorced.  But marrying your creative writing teacher is a good career move.[2]

I vaguely followed Annie’s career without reading her books.  I did eventually find some success, and in 1985, when I published my third novel, Second Brother, I got a call on my landline, all we had in those days.  The voice at the other end said, “David, this is Annie Dillard.”  A rather startling moment.  She said that when she saw the book reviewed in the New York Times, she said to herself, “Is that our David Guy?” and of course it sounded that way, from the description of the book.  She didn’t say she liked or didn’t like the book.  But she told me that she was about to publish a memoir, and our books took place in the same neighborhood, on the same streets, at the same schools, with the same people.  It was uncanny.

Annie was a famous person by then.  But she wasn’t petty like me.  She was happy that a Point Breeze boy had made good.

By that time I was reviewing books for a number of papers, including USA Today (an editor from the Washington Post had taken a job at that paper, and turned the Friday book page into the best part of it; I never missed it), and when An American Childhood came out, the editor asked if I’d like to review it.  I explained that I had once played in the snow with the author, also received a phone call from her, but he didn’t think those things disqualified me, and I had the same reaction reading her book that she had reading mine: the incidents were different, but this was my life.  This was my place and these were my people.

Annie didn’t know the real connection.  In writing Second Brother I had moved residences around so as not to identify people, but the character named Sam Golden in that book was based on my friend Stan Hahn, and Annie’s best friend at Ellis School was Stan’s sister, who is a prominent character in her book.  We didn’t share best friends, but our best friends were in the same memorable family.

Years later, I taught at Duke for a semester, and while I was there a couple of Virginia writers came to visit, Richard Bausch and George Garrett.  They were a traveling road show of anecdotes about writers and writing, both excellent writers themselves, and I was told to have them visit my class, also urge my students to attend an evening program they gave.  I attended myself, and afterwards, outside, who did I see but Annie Dillard.  She was quite recognizable, standing there on a balmy Durham night.  I introduced myself, and she said, “Well.  I haven’t seen you for what, fifty years,” and we had a brief conversation.  Apparently she had a house in Hillsborough for a while[3], so that was how she happened to be in the area.  Those writers may also have had a Hollins connection.

I was surprised by several things in her obituary.  One of her students referred to her as a chain smoker, which didn’t square with her Thoreauvian image.  Another odd detail was that, after spending the day observing Pilgrim Creek, she went home at night to a suburban house.  She didn’t build a cabin beside her Walden Pond.

But I have to say that, reading about her career as a whole, and having myself changed in the ensuing years, I now am interested in her writing.  (I often feel that way when a writer dies.)  She doesn’t sound like a theologian, as some journalist or other described her, but as a spiritual seekers (a term I dislike, though I don’t know of a better one) who studied the literature of the world and all the great traditions, looking for answers to the big questions.  In that way she is like Emerson and Thoreau.  And although people accused her (no less an eminence than Eudora Welty, who apparently reviewed Tinker Creek) of being only interested in herself, I think she was seeing the world through herself, as Whitman did, and Thoreau, and various other solitaries through the years.  It’s an honorable tradition, and one that interests me.

Even the words that the Times quoted to explain the rather long silence at the end of her life didn’t tell the whole story.  It quoted her as saying, “I can no longer travel, can’t meet with strangers, can’t sign books but will sign labels with SASE, can’t write by request, and can’t answer letters.”  They didn’t quote the end of that paragraph, which strikes a completely different tone.  “I’ve got to read and concentrate.  Why?  Beats me.”

It’s what she’d been doing all her life, and she wanted to end in silence.  She had every right to do that.  I can’t help wondering if she was keeping journals.

I’m sorry to have lost an important writer, and yet another friend from Point Breeze.

[1] That was the name of our Pittsburgh neighborhood.  It’s never made much sense to me.

[2] People frown on such behavior these days, but back then it was fairly common for students to have affairs with professors.  I wasn’t especially well-connected but knew five or six people who had.  My own creative writing teacher, Reynolds Price, had an affair with a guy in my class.

[3] I discovered this detail from Robert Baird, who knew Annie in her later years, and wrote a superb reminiscence of her in the New Yorker.  https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/annie-dillards-subject-was-the-whole-world#rid=59e1e352-a045-47b8-b015-1256cf857df3&q=annie+dillard

In the fall of 1969, I was ecstatic to be taking Wallace Fowlie’s course on Proust.  My brother had taken it two years before, in the spring.  On the counsel of my writing mentor, Reynolds Price—he always said, “Take the professor, not the course”—I had taken two Fowlie courses the year before, on 20^th century poetry and 20^th century drama.  I had read some great things—En Attendant Godot for one—but my real interest was in the novel and especially the great modernists; I couldn’t believe my luck that Fowlie was teaching Proust again.  That spring, he would teach a class that he’d taught just once before, on Dante’s Inferno.  That was quite a year for me.

I was never the linguist my brother was, and was not nearly as proficient as a student of French, though in my sophomore year I’d read Madame Bovary and La Chartreuse de Parma in a course on the nineteenth century novel.  In some ways I found Madame Bovary as difficult as Proust, especially because of Flaubert’s mammoth vocabulary.  But I will have to say that, in my senior year, when I was taking some amazing and time-consuming classes, Proust was a challenge.

There was the whole thing of the vocabulary; my Pleiade was studded with vocabulary words I had laboriously looked up in a dictionary.  I would make my way through a sentence, looking up words, then go back and read it again, trying to make sense of it; a page could take ten or fifteen minutes.  Some of the sentences were immense, so the whole effort could be plodding.  Fowlie’s lectures were inspired, of course, and I was surrounded by interesting students.  I enjoyed the class, if I struggled with the reading.

We would finish the novel, Fowlie said, if we read 200 pages per week.  Those were 200 pretty tough pages.

What finally defeated me was my honors program in English.  In the fall we took three month-long seminars on a particular author, and I was trying to get Buford Jones, whom my brother had highly recommended.  I took Henry James, and that did the trick, but the reading he assigned was colossal, three novels, a book of stories, a book of criticism, in one month.  James’ sentences weren’t as long as Proust’s, but they were formidable.  I decided that I would have to start reading Proust in English (confessing that to Fowlie was tough, though he understood).  And I never did finish the novel.  I had to be on my toes with Buford Jones.  I discussed the books with him and two other students, first in his office and then at his home (as we sipped liqueur with a beer chaser.  Those were the days).

I’ve been thinking of returning to Proust for some time, because he seemed to understand something I’d discovered in my Zen practice (of all things): that memories are sometimes lodged in the body.  I had found, as I practiced zazen and systematically relaxed my body, that all kinds of things from the past came up, including trauma (my father’s death when I was sixteen).

I had realized that, in order not to feel certain feelings, we tighten up particular parts of our body, particularly our torso.  I felt a great deal of anger about my father’s death—anger at the universe, at God, something—but had trouble getting into the sadness and fear that were also there, because I was afraid they would tear me apart, or that I would disappear into them and never come out.  That left me rather limited as an emotional being.

As I practiced meditation, I relaxed somatically, and things came up that I could now engage with emotionally.  I could, in effect, go through the experience I should have gone had many years before.  I understood those things from practice (though I’m not sure they are spelled out specifically in the Zen literature), but I also realized that Proust saw this truth in his fiction.  It was the taste of the “petite madeleine” that opened up his entire past.  (Faulkner was getting at the same kind of thing in the Benji section of The Sound and the Fury).  Seeing my experience replicated in literature made me feel it wasn’t some crackpot theory.

I also wanted to return to Proust because, in my mid-seventies, I was assailed by memories from earlier years.  I don’t know what has happened; maybe my life has just slowed down, or maybe such phenomena are a function of old age, especially when you’ve lived in one place for many years and have gone through various life changes there.  But I take a walk around Duke’s East campus and am overwhelmed by things that happened there.  I go to a basketball game in the Indoor Stadium and remember buying my books there in 1966.  It’s as if I’m living in several time periods all at once (it’s like Roger Ebert’s statement right before his death: “I’ve been to a place where the present, past, and future are all happening at once.  Vast doesn’t begin to describe it”).  People say your life passes before you before you die.  Maybe I’m taking a slow-motion tour.

That’s essentially what Proust did, over the years he stayed in his cork-lined room and wrote his novel.  He relived his life, inventing as he went along.

The sentences are magnificent.  I don’t know if they’re particularly good because of Lydia Davis’ translation, but they are something else.  Proust will take the smallest moment and analyze it in overwhelming detail, see more in it than anyone else ever has, but it’s a huge pleasure to read the sentences, as long as you’re not in a hurry.  (That can be a factor at my age.  Do I really want to read his 1.25 million words instead of that number of words in four or five other people?  On the other hand, sometimes when I look back at my Goodreads list—I try to pick good books every time out—I think, what a trail of mediocrity.  They’re good, but do I really remember anything that happened in most of those books?  Maybe I do just want to read Proust.)

We begin with Marcel’s famous problems in getting to sleep because he’s waiting for his mother to come upstairs and kiss him.  What he wanted was what every little kid wants, but he was overly neurotic, sensitive from the time he took his first breath.  He lived in a world largely of adults, where people were cultivated and read good books, saw good art, listened to music and knew it well (Proust’s grandmother gave him books as gifts, but refused to give him the kind of trivial crap that is usually given to children; he was reading Georges Sand as a child).  And I must say, the kid was intellectually precocious.  His age is vague throughout the first volume, but at an age when he was still playing hide and seek with a bunch of little girls, he seemed to have a lot of literature, music, and art under his belt.

We then have the famous episode of Swann’s love itself, told in excruciating detail (and sometimes read as a simple small book, Swann in Love).  We have no idea, of course, how Marcel knows any of this, especially in this much detail, since it all happened before he was born.  It’s also an eye-opening study of French “haute bourgeoisie” (I guess that’s what you’d call them) in the time of Proust’s youth, people who have money and are close to the aristocracy but don’t have the family name and background to qualify.  Their whole lives are social.  They have friends over every night, often for a meal.

Swann’s love affair with Odette is classic, everything from not especially caring for her to slowly being attracted to changing his mind about how he felt, to making a move on her (that seemed to take forever), having sex with her most days, starting to feel jealous about how she is with other men, then worrying over every detail of her daily life and living more or less in agony: nothing is ever enough.  We see this and, of course, see ourselves in it; at the same time, we want to say (as we’ve wanted to say to every lovesick fool we’ve ever known): get a grip, man.  This is ruining your life.  At the end of 200 pages of agony, he seems to realize that himself—it is still long before Marcel is born—but somehow, nevertheless, he marries her.  It stunned me to realize that.  People devote their whole lives to emotional triviality.  That may be because they don’t want to face something larger.

All of this will prefigure future events in the novel; I remember enough to know that.  Marcel’s neurotic agony and Swann’s tortuous love affair will repeat themselves in other ways in the six volumes that remain, as will the elaborate social lives, the incredible snobbery, the jockeying for social position, gossiping, backbiting.  But also—this may be the saving grace—the real understanding of and appreciation for human culture.  This, compared to anything that has come since, is a cultivated group of human beings, at least Marcel and his closest compatriots.

I’ve bought the next volume (translated by a different person.  The idea of this project is brilliant).  I’m reading other things in the meantime.  But we’ll see if I eventually crack Volume II and go on to the others.  It’s an enormously rich reading experience.  It’s also just enormous.

I know of no other writer who is so satisfying as both a literary novelist and a thriller writer as Colson Whitehead.  Graham Greene was great at both, but seemed to keep the genres separate.  Someone like Elmore Leonard is a superb storyteller, period, and one of the best dialogue writers ever, but his books don’t satisfy as literary novels.  But Whitehead’s crime trilogy, and most recently Cool Machine, had me on the edge of my seat, but at the same time was a fascinating portrait of Harlem over a period of three decades.  I can easily see myself reading the whole trilogy again.

At the same time, there’s a finality to this volume that makes it different from the others.  It would be a spoiler to say why, but the trilogy works well together as a single work.

As in the other oboks, there are three novella length narratives in this novel, separated by several years.  In the first, which takes place in 1981, we find Ray Carney, the furniture salesman whose life and career we’ve followed throughout, once again slightly overextending.  His furniture business is doing well again after a ruinous fire; his wife Elizabeth’s career in real estate is also taking off, partly because properties in Harlem are becoming more valuable.  Their children are out of the house and doing well.

But Ray always wants a little bit more, and he’s working as a fence for an old friend of his because he sees a chance to make some easy cash.  But his friend has violated the number one rule of such operations; he hasn’t told Ray where he got the sapphires they’re trying to sell.  A fence needs to know that so he can be circumspect about who he offers them to.  A vicious group of white criminals made the original heist, and someone stole from them; they now want to get their hands on the original stones and the person who swiped them.  They keep referring to a man named Uncle Rich.

Uncle Rich can only be described as a master criminal, the stuff of legends; he did some work with Ray’s father in the old days.  He’s so big-time and legendary that at one point he staged his own death, so people would think he was gone and wouldn’t have any idea what international criminal was pulling off these ingenious heists.  He’s brilliant at planning and picking crews and is planning another job when Ray gets in touch with him, letting him know who’s after him.  I have to say that, if Ray were interested in continuing his criminal enterprises, he would have met his perfect mentor, because Uncle Rich is planning a huge job, with a crack crew.  Ray just wants to get out from under the thumb of the white guys who are pursuing them.  He stays with Uncle Rich long enough to do that, but in the meantime works a couple of jobs with him.

Uncle Rich might be the most memorable character in the trilogy, and the job he’s currently engaged in—retrieving one of Jesse Owen’s gold medals from a safe in the Waldorf-Astoria, where it is awaiting a memorabilia auction—is fascinating.  For Uncle Rich the job is personal; he doesn’t think Owens should have had to sell the medal in the first place.  But they carry out the heist through the bowels of the subway system, along with a crew of homeless folks who are camped there, and the suspense is breathtaking.  You could make a movie out of this episode alone.[1]

The second episode features Ray’s friend Pepper, who was the most memorable character until Uncle Rich came along.  He has appeared in all three of the Harlem novels, and is a cold-blooded criminal, but the kind you root for because he’s had a hard life and is just trying to get by.  He also has his own code of ethics, though they have nothing to do with not breaking the law.  In any case, I was glad to see him return, though he, like all of us, is getting older.  He has terrible stomach problems, which sound like a bleeding ulcer, and he’s constantly dealing with the pain and difficulty of his condition.  He’s the man we’d like to see retire.  But he doesn’t seem to have any prospects for that.

Pepper in this case is working for Elizabeth; one of her real estate clients is involved in a shady attempt to buy a piece of African art; the seller—who seems to be playing one buyer off against another—keeps changing the price and the venue.  He’s now settled on some vague locale in alphabet city (a very funky neighborhood in 1983) and wants the money in cash; the buyer in this case sounds naïve, but he really wants this piece of art.  Elizabeth suggests Pepper as a bodyguard.

Pepper knows nothing about the art world, but he knows a scam when he sees it.  They wind up at a very sketchy bar/disco in the wee hours of the morning, the customer holding onto, and refusing to surrender to Pepper, a bag containing $80,000 in cash.  Pepper’s ulcer kicks up at the worst possible time, and while he’s puking his guts out in the bathroom somebody knocks over his client and grabs the money.  No one at that point has even seen the work of art.  Pepper isn’t in Harlem anymore; he’s in a world he knows nothing about.

But as I said, he has his own set of standards and a lot of pride.  He’ll get the money back if it kills him.  And it might: among the people searching for the artwork is a hired assassin working for somebody else who also wants that piece of art; he kills the guy who stole the money from Pepper, kills another man who has shown interest in the work.  It’s obvious that Pepper is next, and Colson Whitehead is not the kind of author who lets a character live because he’s a favorite (see The Nickel Boys).  The conclusion of this episode is another thriller.

In the final narrative, Ray looks back to an earlier time.  His cousin Freddie was in a way the person who got him into a criminal life (though he also had a genetic proclivity from his father), but Freddie has long since died of an overdose.  Before he did, though, he fathered a child with a young woman named Josephine, and she has been trying to keep him on the straight and narrow.  He’s gotten a great job as the driver and go-to guy for a white lawyer in Queens, but as it turns out, the man has been on the take from some governmental corruption in New York.  The stuff sounds pretty take by current-day standards, businesses giving people bribes to do work for the city, but one of the deals goes south and Freddie’s son winds up as witness to a murder.  We at least think that’s the whole problem.  As it turns out, there was one more thing he hasn’t told us.  He’s on the lam, in any case.  And Ray has to find a way to help him.

The way he does that is, to say the very least, unique, and also a superbly satisfying end to the trilogy.  It isn’t sappy, and isn’t unbelievable, but it’s a real turnaround.  We have a feeling that Ray, and perhaps Colson Whitehead, are finished with crime for the time being.  If you look at the man’s publishing history, there’s no telling what comes next.

[1] Colson Whithead recently appeared on Turner Classic Movies, picking two movies for their Saturday night showings.  He apparently was a latchkey kid who spent a lot of time on the VCR while he was waiting for his parents to get home from work.  He picked The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing.  Two excellent choices.

The Invite a film by Olivia Wilde.  With Olivia Wilde, Penelope Cruz, Seth Rogan, Edward Norton.  Streaming on Prime, for a cost.  *****

The Invite is beautifully acted and directed, hilariously funny, with a tight script and unrelentingly rapid pace that just won’t quit; you’d like to slow it down every few minutes just to catch up on all the jokes.  It’s a Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf for our time, shot in one apartment, where two couples (sometimes one couple) sweat it out.  It is apparently a remake of a Spanish movie that has been redone several times; the idea itself is brilliant.  It’s both hilariously funny and deeply true; you hardly have time to stop laughing before you start crying.  I’m sure there are more important or inventive movies that have come out this year, but there is none that I enjoyed more.

Joe (Seth Rogen) is a failed musician who had a big hit early in his career but at this point is stifled in his creativity and stuck at a second-rate music-conservatory teaching wannabe musicians.  That’s his characterization of the situation, which we hear late in the movie; his wife objects but he won’t hear of it.  Angela (Olivia Wilde) fell in love with him in the early days, and as the movie opens, we hear (I think) a scene from those days where they’re doodling on the piano and having a wonderful time, very much in love.  That time is long gone in the present.  Angela went to art school but has abandoned the photography that she began with; she expresses her creativity now by creatively decorating the apartment they live in, adding details that Joe neither notices nor cares about.

In the only scenes that don’t take place in the apartment, we see Joe dismissing a class that he’s teaching at the conservatory (he gives some lackluster praise, then tells them to play the piece a couple more times after he’s left) and struggling home on the hills of San Francisco on a foldable bicycle (the same hills as in Bullit, but at a rather different pace).  Joe has a bad back and is mildly overweight; by the time he gets home all he wants to do is collapse.  But his wife has invited their new neighbors over for dinner, thinking she has told Joe and asked him to bring wine, but apparently not.  They hardly know these people and have seen them primarily in the elevator.  They’ve been meaning to have them over, and tonight is the night.

They worry that recent renovations in their apartment have been noisy for their neighbors and want to apologize.  But they also want to bring up—at least Joe does—an issue of noise with the neighbors themselves; they’ve been fucking so loud in the wee hours of the morning that it wakes everyone up, including their daughter (who’s off with some friends for the evening).  This is a sore subject especially—we suspect—because Joe and Angela aren’t fucking much themselves.  Anglela is at least expressing her creativity in the apartment but Joe—though he obviously has a gift—isn’t expressing himself at all.  He doesn’t even play the piano anymore, and his studio is off limits to everyone else.

Into this dreadful situation come the neighbors, Pina (Penelope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton).  In comparison to this angry stifled couple, they seem mellow and utterly relaxed (late night fucking will do that for you); they’ve brought a flan and themselves, but if this night isn’t convenient (they can feel the tension in the air), they’ll come back another time.  Angela has spent the whole day putting together a platter of charcuterie, cheeses and a special jamon for Pina, but as it turns out she is the dinner guest from hell: she doesn’t eat meat, dairy, or gluten (she can’t even eat the crackers).  A bowl of olives is about the only thing in the house that she can eat.

Angela is adamantly opposed to bringing up the sex noises at all.  She wants to get to know their neighbors and says they can bring the noises up later.  Joe is far more worked up about the subject, reflecting, I think, his disappointment with life in general.  If he’s not fucking and making music, he doesn’t want anyone else doing it either.  He finally does bring it up (and in fact his neighbors know he was angry); as it turns out, the situation is more complicated than he had thought.

In a movie that is absolutely loaded with laugh lines (Joe is a brilliant person, and his brilliance displays itself in sarcastic humor), I thought the funniest was one that isn’t ostensibly a laugh line at all, delivered by Pina.  “I am a psychotherapist and a sexologist.”  If Penelope Cruz said such words to me, I’d be flabbergasted, probably speechless, then say, “You are a sexologist?  I’m not sure what that involves, but could I get an appointment?”  And though we’re used to sexologists who look like Dr. Ruth, it’s quite another thing when Penelope Cruz is one.  Excuse me, lady, but how did you get into this line of work?

Everything she says from then on about relationships and sex seems right on the money to me.  Hawk has been her patient—Joe sputters at that—but now he’s her partner, and they’re happy indeed (though not above their own spat, which they have late in the movie and which humanizes them).  The movie doesn’t become more serious when Pina reveals how things got started for them.  It just becomes more interesting.

It becomes serious when Joe—ever wielding the sarcasm—insists that Hawk can’t be the man’s real name.  He also can’t believe he was a firefighter because the man doesn’t seem macho enough, and he asks Hawk, whose given name was Howard, where he got his new name.  Hawk’s answer, a long monologue about his past, was to me the most moving moment in the movie (followed, naturally, by a sarcastic remark from Joe) and took things to a whole new level.  I don’t think it spoils anything to mention Pina’s final pronouncement on Joe and Angela, which stays with us long after the movie is over.  “I think we only get a few chances at meaningful relationships, usually we move to different people, sometimes we can have a new relationship with the same people. But I think this relationship is over.”

I know it seems I’ve given a lot away, but I haven’t given away the most exciting and hilarious thing, which really is the heart of the movie.  Let me just say that the title doesn’t refer to Angela inviting Pina and Hawk to the apartment, as for a long time I thought it did.  It refers to another invitation, which changes the evening into something else altogether.

Then again, it doesn’t.  It deepens everything and changes nothing.

One Battle After Another a film by Paul Thomas Anderson.  With Teyanna Taylor, Leonardo Di Caprio, Sean Penn, Chase Infiniti, Benicio del Toro.  *****

I have now read my third Thomas Pynchon novel, and all I can say is, I’m trying, folks, I’m trying.  I greatly admire the man’s talent.  I admit he’s a great writer.  He is also a voracious knower of things, all kinds of arcane knowledge, physics and math, spiritual disciplines, martial arts, television shows (did the man watch a lot of television?  Why?), things people ate, wore, the landscapes they walked through.  He not only notices a lot but remembers everything (reminds me of David Foster Wallace).  Paranoia is a serious theme in his work, as everyone has noticed.  If there’s a way to be paranoid in a situation, he’ll find it.  His work is also quite funny, intricately plotted, sexy, intelligent.  I could go on and on.  My admiration is boundless.

But somehow I don’t warm to it.  I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

It may just be that I’m not the pop culture type.  I mean, Ninja nuns?  With supernatural powers?  A group of ghostlike not-quite-humans called thanatoids?  A place where you go to be cured of your television addiction (Pynchon is a prime candidate), a man who apparently dies but doesn’t know when it happened?  There’s a certain Kurt Vonnegut feel to this guy’s work.

I was especially interested in this book because the movie One Battle After Another is loosely based on it.  I loved and greatly admired the movie, so I thought I would be interested in the book.

What I would say now is that director Paul Thomas Anderson took the basic situation then did what he wanted.  I thought what he did was brilliant.  But he made a completely different story out of it.

In the novel—whose present time is in the eighties—a burnt out musician named Zoyd Wheeler is living on disability, and all he has to do to qualify is perform one outrageous act per year, which a cohort of fellow hippies gathers to watch; lately he’s been diving through a plate glass window in pursuit of someone, shattering the glass.  He’s father to a teenager named Prairie, whose mother abandoned her and Zoyd when the girl was an infant, leaving him to raise her alone.  He’s not Father Knows Best material (there!  I too can make a television reference), but he’s devoted to his daughter.

Her mother is a woman named Frenesi Gates (in a book of great names, she has the greatest) who comes from a long line of political activists (in the movie she’s black, but there’s no mention of race in the book).  She was a nonviolent radical in the sixties and believed that documenting wrongdoing was her best weapon; she was constantly making films of the repressive measures of the government, especially the violent repression of a demonstration at a small college.  But she fell in love, or at least in lust, with one of her oppressors, a man named Brock Vond.  Of all the things that happen in the book, that’s the most inexplicable, or at least unexplained, though of course there’s no accounting for taste.  Apparently she had a thing for authoritarians, though Zoyd is a far better human being.  Eventually Vond caught her an illegal activity, and in an effort to protect herself she ratted on some of her friends and disappeared from the movement.  Prairie has no memory of her.

In the early eighties, Vond has resurfaced to come after Prairie, who herself has political leanings.  When he is pursuing her, she encounters a woman named DL Chastain, an accomplished martial artist and an old friend of Frenesi’s, who realizes she needs to protect the young woman.  She takes her to the Sisterhood of Kunoichi Attentives, a group of Ninja nuns that DL previously trained with.  DL has all kinds of fantastic powers, including the ability to kill a man with a single blow, or deliver a blow that will kill him a year later (Kung Fu movies were apparently among Pynchon’s pop culture interests).  The Sisterhood knows Frenesi was a rat, but they also own the movies that she took all those years ago.  Through watching them, Prairie sees what her parents were like.

The sisterhood also exists in One Battle After Another, though I believe they have a different name.  But in the movie the daughter is herself a martial artist, trained by a man she calls Sensei, though he is Latino, played by Benicio Del Toro.  I don’t know where Paul Thomas Anderson got that idea, but Del Toro’s character is one of the most memorable and heartening in the movie.

The novel’s plot, such as it is, involves Vond coming after Prairie, and he eventually settles on a family reunion of the radical family that Frenesi belonged to.  Unlike in the movie, Frenesi is still around in the eighties, and the big question for me was whether Prairie would actually encounter her mother and how that would go (and how Zoyd would do with all that).  I won’t answer that question, but the book winds up in a much different place from the movie.  They’re completely different works of art.

The day after I finished the book, I watched the movie again.  I told my wife we had to watch it over two nights—it’s almost three hours long—but we couldn’t stop ourselves and stayed up way past our bedtime.  As brilliant as the book is, I honestly thought, this one time,[1] that the movie was better.  You should read the book.  But you’ve got to see the movie.

[1] Talking to my wife, I thought of one other such instance.  The Godfather.

At the moment, I swim at three different North Carolina pools.  One is the YMCA in Durham, which has six wide lanes and a huge variation in the number of people who show up, but almost never is the pool full (two people per lane).  I also swim at the Y in Asheville, which is an older building which similarly has one whole pool devoted to lap swimming,[1] but the lap pool has only four lanes, noticeably narrower than those in the Durham Y.  I also sometimes swim at the Orange County Sportsplex in Hillsborough, a beautiful new facility that has two mammoth pools; the lap pool can be set up lengthwise for 25-meter laps or widthwise for 25 yards.  At the moment it’s meters.  There are ten lanes, every bit as wide as those at the Durham Y.  Easily wide enough for sharing.

But nobody seems to share.

I’ve been swimming at the downtown Durham Y since it opened in 1996.  Prior to that I swam in the ancient, murky, warmish pool at the Lakewood Y, my only option; I swam there for nine years and have fond memories of it.  I was often the only person swimming, or there might be one other.  I didn’t know what to think when the new Y opened, but I gave it a try; I was stunned to find two pools with one devoted to lap swimming all the time (the Lakewood Y had scheduled lap times).  The facility was beautiful, and I immediately started swimming there.

At that point, I had rarely shared a lane.  I often hadn’t even shared the pool.

Through the years, the Y has gotten larger and larger in membership, and more swimmers have shown up.  There’s a certain group that shows up in the afternoon—all pools have such groups—and we’ve gotten to recognize one another, though we don’t always know names (I know people by their strokes.  I can enter the vicinity of the pool and instantly see who’s there).  We prefer having our own lanes but are happy to share when the place is crowded.  The swim team shows up at 3:45, so we’ve got to finish by then.

I began swimming in Asheville when we lived there in the summer to take care of my wife’s parents; for five years she rented half a duplex for the whole year just to be there in the summer and at academic breaks; later we had a chance to buy the family homestead and gradually did that.  In the early days, I might have to share one of those narrow lanes, which was more difficult than at the Durham Y, but again, people expected to share.

Both of these cities—Durham and Asheville—have seen huge growth in recent years, Asheville because people are moving away from more crowded states (Texas, New York, Florida), Durham because tech businesses have moved to the area.  Both pools have gotten more crowded, the Durham Y with young athletic people, Asheville with retirees.  Both Y’s are getting run-down, but there aren’t a lot of choices for swimming pools.  So we make do.

The Asheville Y is wild.  It’s common to show up and have every lane occupied by two people.  Most people prefer to wait, but some ask the occupants to circle swim, the procedure for three or more people in a lane.  It’s quite something to see even eight people in that pool, much less ten or eleven.  People who have stumbled in for the first time are stunned.  But those of us who go often are used to it.  We talk to others as we wait for a lane, greet people as we get into the pool.  There’s a feeling—quite literally—that we’re all in this together.  If we can have a tiny sliver of water for a period of time, we’re content.  It’s water; we’re moving through it.  It’s the greatest.

I go to the Asheville Y thinking of every day as an adventure.  You have no idea what the hell will happen.

Sometimes at the Durham Y, I see a little resentment on the face of people (especially young people) when I ask to share the lane (the feeling seems to be, Who’s this old fart?), and I want to say, I was swimming here before you were born, you little twit.  I’ve belonged to the Y for 39 years.  But I don’t.

I started going to the Hillsborough pool because they don’t close during thunderstorms (an occupational hazard for Y swimmers.  One clap of thunder and the pool closes for thirty minutes.  If there’s another clap after 29 minutes, it’s another thirty minutes).  North Carolina in the summer is prone to afternoon thunder showers.  In Asheville, that adds to the suspense of going to the Y, but I don’t have an alternative.  In Durham, I can always drive the extra ten minutes and go to Hillsborough.

It is by far the most beautiful facility.  There are ten wide lanes (the end lanes are especially wide) and the water is clear and cold.  But nobody shares.  The place exudes a feeling of: I paid for this membership and I got here early and I got this lane and you can go fuck yourself.  It’s a bunch of middle-aged, nearly all white, swimmers (the Durham group is more diverse).  They’re very proprietary, though it’s not a posh place.  For a senior, it’s cheaper than the Y.

When I was there the other day, two of us were waiting for a lane, and the guy in the wide end lane was getting out, so the other guy waiting asked if I would share (I’d gotten there first) and I said of course.  There was plenty of room.  Mammoth.  In Asheville that would have been two lanes.

I don’t think that people in Hillsborough are greedy.  It’s just that, when you have such abundance, a whole new facility like that, you want to enjoy the luxury.  You want it all to yourself.  But places change, as do populations (especially in North Carolina, which everyone seems to be flocking to).  There will be a time when people in Hillsborough need to share lanes.  They’ll learn to do it.

I love swimming pools and I love swimming.  I love the people who come to swim, love watching the way they swim; I actually like talking to them.  And I will admit that the Hillsborough pool is the best place to swim.  But the best feeling is at the Asheville Y.  It’s more like, We’re all swimming together and we’ll find a way to do it.  There’s room for everybody.  Jump in and we’ll figure it out.

[1] As do all these places.  There’s a lap pool and a separate pool for recreational swimming.

The Dharma Gate of Ease and Joy: Zazen for Every Body by Darlene Cohen and Beata Chapman.  Russian River Zendo.  62pp.  *****

If anyone was qualified to write a book about suffering, it was Darlene Cohen.  She arrived at the San Francisco Zen Center as a beautiful, vivacious, vigorously healthy woman in her twenties, iconoclastic but also dedicated to practice.  My teacher once told us that Darlene was the woman all the men at the Zen Center had the hots for (I don’t think she put it that way, but that’s what she meant).  At the age of 35 Darlene was stricken with rheumatoid arthritis, a condition that had also afflicted her mother, and became someone for whom every physical action was difficult.

She describes at one point walking from her apartment to the Zen Center and not having the strength to climb the three or four steps to the entrance.  This from a woman who had taken long runs while living at Tassajara.  It would have been easy for her to abandon Zen altogether, to say that she couldn’t do so vigorous a physical practice, but after a period of transition (I can imagine it took a while) she decided it must be possible to practice with the body she had.  And she became a spokeswoman for people with bodies that were limited in some way.  That includes all of us sooner or later.

The medication that she was taking for her arthritis compromised her immune system, so after a period of time she was stricken with ovarian cancer, which was another severe physical limitation.  But she continued to find ways to practice, and to work as a body worker, also to teach at various places (I was stunned when I read how many sanghas she associated with, three or four).  So she was a dharma teacher, body worker, and prolific writer, not apparently limited by her illnesses and worked at all those things until the cancer took her life in 2011.

Darlene in her lifetime published four books, Arthritis: Stop Suffering, Start Moving; Finding a Joyful Life in the Heart of Pain, which she later revised and published as Turning Suffering Inside Out: A Zen Approach to Living with Physical and Emotional Pain; and The One Who Is Not Busy: Connecting with Work in a Deeply Satisfying Way.  She and Beata Chapman also created a booklet with illustrations by Chuck Overly about how to practice with physical limitations.  It is the booklet I recommend to anyone who is having difficulty with the traditional zazen postures, even to people who aren’t.  The five or six pages about zazen in this booklet are some of the most incisive words I’ve ever read on the subject.

Now one of Darlene’s dharma heirs, Cynthia Kear, has published a new book of Darlene’s teaching, including dharma talks and articles from magazines.  Kear includes her own commentary on some of the work, and remembrances by a number of Darlene’s students.  It may be self-published (I can’t find anything on the internet about Zoshin Publishing), but it is beautifully done, and includes some great photographs.  It’s a little pricey but worth every penny.

While she was alive, Darlene maintained a website, and she wrote a passage there that struck me when I first read it, and became a lodestar I kept returning to.  She included it also in Turning Suffering Inside Out.  I’m not sure why certain phrasings strike us more than others (she was really just saying what other people had said in other ways), but these words always brought me back on track.

“When Chogyam Trungpa wrote in Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior that ‘the human potential for intelligence and dignity is attuned to experiencing the objects around us, the brilliance of the blue sky, the freshness of green fields, and the beauty of the trees and mountains,’ I think he was suggesting that our intelligence and dignity themselves are developed by our being alive for the mundane chaos of our lives.  If we cultivate awareness of our actual experience, without reference to any preconceived idea, then we don’t prefer any state of mind.  Intimacy with our activity and the objects around us connects us deeply to our lives.  This connection—to the earth, our bodies, our sense impressions, our creative energies, our feelings, other people—is the only way I know of to alleviate suffering.  To me awareness of these things without preference is a meditation that synchronizes body and mind.  This synchronization, the experience of deep integrity, of being all of a piece, is a very deep healing.  It is unconventional to value such a subtle experience.  It is not encouraged in our culture.  We’re much more apt to strive to feel special, uniquely talented, particularly loved.  It’s extraordinary to be willing to live an ordinary life, to be fully alive for the laundry, to be present for the dishes.  We overlook these everyday connections to our lives, waiting for The Event.”

There is also a passage in The Dharma Gate of Ease and Joy, one that I sometimes turn to when I’m confused about what I’m doing in zazen (that happens more than I’d like to admit, after thirty years of practice).  She’s speaking of what some teachers call Choiceless Awareness, or The Method of No Method; she used the words simultaneous inclusion, and explained how it is based in the body.

“Simultaneous inclusion is much more challenging [than just following the breathing].  It boggles the mind.  Because it boggles the mind, the body provides the stability to enable [it].  That is why it was necessary for Dogen to set out the essentials of zazen.  Zazen is a tantric practice, requiring the full synergy of body and mind.  This is why posture is so emphasized in zazen and Zen practice.  Certain bodily factors must be in place before the mind is able to simultaneously include the totality of experience as the object of focus.”

The one thing many of her students said in their memories of their teacher is that she encouraged body to body practice.  She felt that the physical presence of the teacher was important (something that we can lose sight of in these days of online teaching).  People seemed to learn the most from just hanging around with her, spending a day together, having meals.  One woman said it was a major teaching for her to see the way Darlene savored her breakfast tea (the hot cup, which she held with both hands, helped with her arthritis).

This is a woman who, in dealing with an overbearing teacher, once took her through the car wash and lowered the window on that woman’s side (her teacher, remarkably, seemed to recognize and accept the criticism); who insisted on wearing makeup and earrings in the zendo; who wore a lavendar okesa (sewn by her students in her honor; there are several photos of this striking garment in the book); who gave a lecture in which, disagreeing with Thich Nhat Hanh on the precept about sexuality, she said it might be important for young women to have a variety of sexual experiences, not just with people they “loved”; who, when she was the bath attendant at Tassajara, called out, “Cover your eyes, boys, I’m comin’ in”; who said, in the midst of a group of women who surrounded her within days of her death, “I don’t believe in karma or any of that shit” (I found that anecdote in The Hidden Lamp).  She left us thirteen guidelines for practice, beginning with, “Always assume these are the perfect conditions under which to practice” and ending with “Don’t be cool, detached, sophisticated.  Be alive to it all,” followed by one last guideline.  “Eat chocolate.”

This is a delightful and inspiring book, unlike any other dharma book you’ve read.  You’ll want to own it.

And you can buy it at the San Francisco Zen Center:

https://store.sfzc.org/product/alive-for-it-all-wisdom-for-everyday-life-the-teachings-of-darlene-cohen-kear-cynthia-/DBO74FU2CRPBIZK4XOW4RCMG?srsltid=AfmBOor_D4sxmU0q2m239o35YzYC6fo2Oqjikg4XyXF0wAwLBbIa31nP

The Oyster Diaries a novel by Nancy Lemann.  New York Review Books   240 pp. *****

Transcendence for Beginners: Life Writing and Philosophy by Clare Carlisle. New York Review Books.  194 pp.  *****

Lives of the Saints is not a book I would expect to like.  It concerns a group of decadent aristocrats in New Orleans, which is deadly hot and swampy, with overhanging trees and lush vegetation that is stifling just to read about.  These people wear formal dresses and seersucker suits to social occasions and sweat through the heat.  They have little apparent stress in their lives yet suffer constantly from (what they call) nervous breakdowns.  They seem to live on alcohol alone.

This is the kind of novel where a man walks up to a beautifully-dressed woman during a long day’s celebration and says, “Could I get you a drink?”, and instead of saying, “No, I’ve already had fourteen,” she says, “Why yes, I would love one,” as if that were a spectacularly novel idea.  The novel opens with a wedding reception—for a couple that is already on the verge of splitting up, though they were married hours before—and it is the hottest, sweatiest event imaginable, though I’ve lived most of my life in Durham, NC.  New Orleans seems to have another kind of heat altogether.

I thought the day would never end.

Yet in the midst of this world there are saints—at least two; there is even a small child whose name is Saint—and a woman narrator who, though she is living a life much like everyone else’s, working as a clerk in a law firm—is able to perceive them as saints.  That might be even more rare.

We like our saints to be obvious.  Mother Teresa or Bishop Desmond Tutu.  We don’t want them portly and sweaty, smelling of alcohol, chasing after women, smoking cigars, or—in the case of our most unlikely saint—constantly tearing up matchbooks and pieces of paper in a nervous habit that leaves a trail of trash in his wake.  And yet, in the unlikeliest of places, these men have open loving compassionate hearts despite all their flaws, and they inspire love in the woman who observes them.

That would be Louise Brown, our narrator.  She knows the whole social scene, has known it all her life, but has a special thing for Claude Collier, the young handsome man who keeps leaving scraps in his wake.  He is, despite his apparent indolence, a creative person, an inventor; he’s patented a shrimp shelling device that I for one would like to get my hands on.  He lives on family money and the earnings from his inventions, and apparently, though he seems to be staggering around drunk, is in a constant state of creative ferment, envisioning new inventions.  Or maybe he’s waiting for inspiration to strike.  (Or maybe he’s just drunk.}

His father, Saint Louis Collier (there’s a name for you) is one of the finest attorneys in town but hardly seems to practice law.  He is obsessed with classical languages and opera, and loves to do gardening projects; he more or less lives for the weekend when he can indulge in these things and play with his young son Saint, the child of his old—or at least late middle—age.  Saint is especially precious to him because his birth his begetting marked the end of a long uneasy hiatus in his marriage, when his wife was disaffected from him.  We never hear why exactly (though the man is definitely eccentric.  On one occasion he has lit eight cigars at one time, and when Louise asks why, he says, “Because it’s Sunday.  Hmm).

Lemann, to say the least, is a novelist who works by indirection; that first scene lasts forever, and we are way into the novel before we realize what the book is actually about, if we ever do (if it is about anything).  It seems to be just a comic portrait of these eccentric people, but I would like to venture the opinion that it is really about Louise’s love for Claude, who keeps coming back to her and seeming to love her but then disappearing (and often showing interest in other women).  He also hangs around a collection of New Orleans low-lifes, and though that seems to be saintlike behavior on his part, loving all people as children of God, he apparently gets involved in a horse-betting scheme that has gone awry.  By the time we’ve decided that the novel is about Louise’s love for Claude, we’re convinced it can’t have a good end, but the moment when it does end, in the novel’s final scene, in fact its final paragraph, is nevertheless heartbreaking, but also open ended.  This novel that never seemed to be going anywhere doesn’t wind up anywhere either.

Dwight Garner has expressed the opinion that Lives of the Saints is superior to the much more recent The Oyster Diaries, and while that may, strictly speaking, be true, anyone who finishes Lives of the Saints will want to move on to this new book, especially when we hear that Claude Collier returns in it.  The narrator in this novel is named Delery Anhalt, and though she has a different name than Louise, and a different history, all the old obsessions are there.  She has lived in the DC area but returns periodically to New Orleans; she is bookish, witty, and self-deprecating, just like Louise; opera and classical languages are once again central to her story, and most of all, though Delery is married with two children, she seems to be in love with Claude, who shows up midway in the book.

She too is a master of indirect narration; there has been a problem with her marriage though it takes forever for us to nail it down.  Plot details like that aren’t the point in this book or in Lives of the Saints.  The point is to enjoy the ruminations of this offbeat but extremely funny and interesting human being.  She reveals in this novel that Claude was “one of those men” who frequented strip joints and patronized prostitutes, for whatever reason, though all women seem to love him.  He also, when his marriage ends, cares for his disabled child on his own, though his wife has left with the other kids, and instead of this being a burden, it’s a huge blessing.  He’s now grown portly like his father, still sweats buckets, and has all his old bad habits.  He’s also as saintly and love-inspiring as ever.

I think that ultimately, both of these books are about the woman who narrates them, and honestly, I’d read ten books by her (though there is a final section of this book, about an African safari, that feels tacked on and rather stupid; I wish she had cut it).  I enjoy her company, and her mind.  Garner recommends a nonfiction book that I expect to move on to soon—it was commissioned by Vanity Fair but killed because it didn’t adhere to the magazine’s standards.  (I wouldn’t have expected it to.  Had they read the woman’s work?)  Nancy Lemann is a real find.

I seem to be on a New York Review Books kick, but that is strictly coincidental.  I discovered Clare Carlisle’s book in a New Yorker feature called What We’re Reading, not a traditional book review at all, more like the quick takes on Goodreads or Amazon.  But it convinced me to check the book out, and I’m glad I did.  It focuses on a more conventional kind of saint, or religious figure.  But the collection of people Carlisle has come up with is offbeat and fascinating.

She is a philosopher by trade, but her writing life has focused on lives of various people, including Spinoza, George Eliot, and Kierkegaard.  She devotes a substantial section of this book to the very activity of writing lives, which she has given her life to.  And she delivered the chapters of this book as Gifford Lectures, a series of talks at ancient Scottish universities that have inspired a number of distinguished books (the list is astonishing  https://giffordlectures.org/).7y

Carlisle begins with Spinoza, a philosopher whom I read in a survey of philosophy that I did in college, but I have no memory of him.  Her book on Spinoza is called Spinoza’s Religion, and that title seems apt; what he says in his Ethics sounds astonishingly like the teachings of Eastern Religions (though with a different vocabulary): there is only one God, we are a part of that One, everyone and everything is a part of it; when we die we’re still a part of it.  Einstein supposedly said, when asked if he believed in God, “I believe in the God of Spinoza,” and—as Smokey Robinson once said—I second that emotion.  Spinoza’s view not only makes sense; it is one of those teachings that I always believed in some deep part of myself, but had never heard anyone express.  But Spinoza expressed it centuries ago (and Eastern religions centuries before that).

Carlisle has also written a book on the British novelist George Eliot, who got her start translating Spinoza’s Ethics (at which time she was known by her given name, Mary Ann Evans).  She then proceeded to write her mammoth novels—including the book that some people consider the greatest novel of all time, Middlemarch—in which she embodied the ideas of Spinoza.  Eliot expresses the idea that human beings influence each other in diffusive ways; they might not be great leaders or important people, but they still have substantial influence.  Carlisle points out that writing a person’s life can have a similar effect, what details the author chooses, what she chooses to leave out.  In a way, every biographer is creating a different person.

Carlisle also writes about Kierkegaard—a man I’m less familiar with—whose instincts agreed with Spinoza’s view but who was trying to reconcile them with more traditional religious views.  In the course of writing about these people, Carlisle mentions that she has changed her own life in various ways, beginning to meditate and do yoga, and that she met realized people in both of those endeavors.  But the most interesting chapter in the book for me was the one on Ramana Maharshi, the most extreme person in the book.  I’ve read about him before, but never in such a cogent and fascinating chapter.

Maharshi famously had an experience when he was young of an extreme fear of death, after his father died.  We all have that—I certainly have—but he faced it directly, lying on the ground and imagining he was dead.  He could imagine his body being dead but felt there was something within him that would survive.  He went on a pilgrimage to a nearby sacred mountain named Arunachala, and pretty much never left.  His mother pursued him and pleaded with him to come back, but he let her know he couldn’t.  Years later she came to join him there, and he lived with her at the base of the mountain.  When she died, he built a structure in honor of her, then founded an ashram at the base of the mountain, where he lived for the rest of his life.  I don’t know if it is correct to say he practiced meditation or that he was in a state of meditation all the time, but people who visited felt a profound peace in his presence.  Countless people reported that, both Easterners and Westerners.  Carlisle’s own meditation teacher had had an experience with the man, and no less an eminence than Somerset Maugham once visited, and base his novel The Razor’s Edge on that experience.

This whole chapter illustrates what Carlisle had been saying about diffusive influence.  Maharshi had no wish to influence anyone; he was just leading his life as he saw fit, but eventually influenced countless people all over the world, sometimes in mysterious ways.  Carlisle’s meditation teacher, for instance, had had a traumatic experience in World War I and was facing a personal crisis when he had a vision of Maharshi, though he’d never heard of him or seen his picture.  In another context that would sound crazy, but by the time we get to the incident in this book it’s hardly even surprising.  Maugham was a rationalist if there ever was one, and a non-religious person, but even he had a major experience of some kind when he encountered Maharshi, and wrote about it beautifully not only in his famous novel, but in his final piece of writing, an essay called “The Saint.”

I’ve come a long way from stumbling across Lives of the Saints in a review devoted to another book.  Sometimes I wonder at the magical way books seem to fall into my life in exactly the right way.  I see the same thing in Claire Carlisle’s life; one book led to another, and to a life’s work that all somehow goes together (and it’s far from over; she’s still a young woman).  I highly recommend Lives of the Saints, with The Oyster Diaries on the side if you fall in love—as I did—with Lemann’s voice.  But Transcendence for Beginners is the big discovery this time around.  I’ll be exploring more of Carlisle’s books.

When I was young in Pittsburgh, it was an insult to be called a jag off, but it could have been worse (at least they weren’t saying something about your mother).  Until the age of eleven or twelve, I didn’t know what the expression meant.  By the time I found out, I was guilty as charged, but I’ve often wondered what makes it an insult, when it describes behavior that is nearly universal (as we used to say, 95% of young men masturbate, and the other 5% are liars).  I think the reason it’s insulting is that it implies you can’t get laid.  That was the thing that felt bad about masturbation when I was young.  I couldn’t have real sex.  All I could do is jerk off.[1]

Imagine my surprise, then, when I was reading Helen Lewis’ excellent article in the Atlantic, “The Men Who Want Women to be Quiet,” to find out that Nick Fuentes, the hugely important influencer of young men, describes himself as a “Christian nationalist, anti-Semite, and virgin.”  Virgin?  Back in my day (as the old farts say) that would have disqualified him from being an expert on anything, much less manhood.  How can he be an expert on manhood if he’s never fucked?[2]

Lewis’ article concerns masculinism, a term I’d never heard before but which, I must say, is a mouthful.  Fuentes is one kind of masculinist but not the only kind.  Even men who get laid regularly can be masculinist, though I can’t understand why any woman would want them.  Masculinists resent women’s standing in the world, their rise in the workforce at the expense of men, their influence in politics; they also resent the fact that they can’t get a date with these people whom they resent so much, though that seems to be a real chicken and egg question.[3]

Lewis’ article was overwhelming to the point of being almost farcical.  Is there anything men don’t resent women for?  They blame all their problems on women.

I have a complicated—though deep-seated and sincere—feeling about why men resent women.  They’re afraid of them.  They’re afraid of their emotional/sexual/spiritual power (also of their superior intellects, though that’s not the most important thing).[4]  That is my explanation of the rise of the patriarchy in every field, but especially in religion, where it has been disastrous, dumbing down religious truth and codifying it, essentially falsifying it.  To take just one example, Mary Magdallen—even in the standard Gospels, to say nothing of the apocryphal one with her name on it—got Jesus in a way that the disciples never did.  The disciples come across as a bunch of doofuses.  But it is the men who established the official religion (which we’re stuck with today), while Mary, the legends tell us, went off to meditate in caves in France.

The only hope for change in this situation is for men to face their fear.  I’m not holding my breath.

All of this comes up because of Tom Junod’s excellent memoir, in whose title he states a fact of men’s lives: we form our opinion of what a man is by the examples men set for us, especially our fathers.  And while we’re not wedded to that opinion forever, it’s hugely formative.

Junod’s father was most emphatically not a jag off.  He knew how to dress, comport himself, run a business, order at a restaurant, the works, and he most definitely knew how to get laid.  The problem wasn’t knowing all that.  The problem was turning it off.

Junod’s memoir is fascinating in that we keep seeing his father through different lenses, and our opinion keeps changing.  He starts off as a male role model anyone would admire.  He runs a successful business—selling women’s purses, of all things—dresses beautifully and elaborately[5], and is actually very close to his son, and treats him well.  There’s an implication that he wants the boy to be like him, but he doesn’t push that on him.

This is a man who said—and other people said this about him—that when he walked down Fifth Avenue in New York, women stared at him, and some came on to him.  (A problem I’ve never had.)  He spent so much time in New York that he had a regular room in a hotel, and knew people at restaurants all over the city.  He also travelled to San Francisco and other cities taking orders for handbags for department stores, and he believed, no doubt rightly, that his appearance helped him with sales.  His buyers were usually women.

Does this sound like a man who had affairs?  A stupid question; the real question is: when, and how, will his son find out?  He did so at first by snooping among his father’s things, much later by seeking out people—sometimes the women themselves—and asking about it.  I’ve never heard of anyone going to this much trouble to discover things about his father.  And discover things he does, sometimes things he’d rather not know.  But the women all say the man was a wonderful lover.  He sincerely and deeply loved women.

That meant, of course, that he didn’t treat his wife well.  She was as much of a beauty as the rest of them, at least when things started, but she could never rein him in and didn’t really try, especially as time went on.  She had a fierce love-hate relationship with the man, which affected their whole lives.  They were still together at the end, which wasn’t especially pretty (but it often isn’t).

This was a man who was most emphatically not afraid of women, who loved women and was loved back, but who, in another way, treated them badly.  (The great writer Peter Matthiessen, about whom I recently read a massive biography, was similar.  He was attractive to women, and that was a major way to burnish his ego.  He could never give it up.)  The whole question this raises—how do you fully live out your sex life while being faithful to one person—is one that human beings have been struggling with forever, and Lou Jounod—and his son—didn’t solve it.  Apparently modern women have the same problem, if we can take All Fours as an example.

Junod became obsessed with his whole family, and made some astonishing discoveries along the way.  (I won’t go into them; I’ll just say I thought of titling this piece Grandma Was a Slut).  I got a little tired of all that, and while I can see that it was interesting to him, it went on too long for me.  I nevertheless found his father fascinating.  A shorter book that focused just on that man would have worked better for me.  Junod, it seemed, wanted to put his whole life between covers.

In the end, you want to say, why were you so obsessed with this man, who was admirable in his own way but was also a serial adulterer who came close to leaving his wife for another woman (whom he then would have betrayed).  Why aren’t you angry at him?  Junod gives a good answer.

“I took so much from him, I owe so much to him, and when I respond to the world I am often responding through him, for better and for worse.  He taught me how to live, man—and he gave me permission to enjoy life.  He might not have been a good man but he was an elemental one, and I feel his presence when I eat, when I drink, when I make love, when I breathe.  Anger never had a chance.”

[1] When I wrote my book The Red Thread of Passion, about sex and spirituality, someone asked me what my most surprising discovery was.  I said that the great sex experts in the world—I was thinking of Joseph Kramer and Annie Sprinkle—did not consider masturbation an inferior practice.  They considered it to be as real as any other kind of sex.  Just one more option.

[2] He claims he wants to relegate women to breeding farms.  If he went to such a place, would he know what to do?

[3] I was startled to read that the two young men who did the recent shooting at the mosque in San Diego didn’t just hate Muslims, they also hated Jews, blacks, and were misogynistic, resenting the fact that they hadn’t had more success with women, a fact which they attributed—before they took their own lives—to their short stature.  Talk to Mel Brooks about that.  Or Martin Short.

[4] My first career was as a seventh grade English teacher, and I spent a lot of my time working with 12-year-old boys who didn’t think they were as good in English as the girls.  They weren’t.  But they had also spent their entire school careers in situations where the girls were quicker, neater, smarter, had better penmanship.  So I spent all my time telling them they were better than they thought they were.  Eventually, I convinced them.  They just lacked confidence.

[5] I’ve never heard of a man taking this kind of care in dressing.  The lotions and scents with which he treated himself would (and did) fill a bathroom, so that no one else could use it.  The most stunning example came when young Tom was going on a date, and his father told him to clean out his navel using witch hazel and a Q-tip.  He recommended that he spend five minutes doing that.

In 1987, at the age of 39, I was at a low point emotionally.  My wife and I had split up two years before.  After floundering around for a while, I started a new romance with a woman that seemed to be working out.  I’d explained that I had no wish to live with a woman or get married as long as my son was still living with me (he was 14), and she understood.  She was a widow with two daughters and had been alone for a while.  She wasn’t one of the women I’d initially thought of dating, but she called me about some writing advice, and that made me think of her.  Before I could call and ask for a date, she called and asked me.  A good sign.

I would now say about that romance that everything in bed was great, out of bed not so great.  She had a way of negotiating differences that left me feeling I’d been treated fairly, but she always got what she wanted and I never did.  I was casual about trying things like restaurants and movies (my son and I went to a movie every Sunday afternoon under the motto, Any movie is better than no movie, and if a restaurant looked half-decent we’d take a crack at it), but she read reviews, did endless research, and most of the time decided not to do whatever I suggested.  We differed wildly as parents: when her daughters got home, they were each allowed half a grapefruit and a stick of sugarless gum.  My son came home and fixed himself a Phillie Cheese Steak.

After about a year and a half, she moved residences to get in a better school district for her daughters, and began to talk about my moving there with her, though nothing had changed in my feelings.  Pretty soon we were arguing about everything, and things started to go wrong even in bed.  Ultimately we wanted different things, and I can now see it was good that we parted when we did.

I didn’t feel that way at the time.  I’d tried to make two relationships work—one a marriage of fifteen years—and neither had.  I was starting to wonder if I was cut out for this.  Right after this second break-up, I came home to find a sweater sitting on my front porch, a rather expensive item that I’d recently given my lady friend for her birthday.  What did she want me to do, wear it myself?  (I gave it to my ex-wife, who said it had been mean to return it that way and that she’d be happy to wear it.)

It was in that uneasy mood that I decided to go to a movie the following Saturday night.  A friend had said to me, when I split up with my wife: when you can appear in public by yourself, and not be self-conscious, you’ll know you’re okay.  I’d gotten to a point where I could go to the neighborhood restaurant by myself, and I figured going to the movies was the same thing.  I was alone.  Did someone have a problem with that?

It’s hard to remember, or even believe, but in those days the Center Theater in Durham’s Lakewood neighborhood was a thriving movie theater with a big screen and lots of parking, and when I went that night the place was packed, cars all over the place, because a new movie was opening.  I got my ticket and went in to find a seat (I actually saw my former girlfriend with a new guy; she worked fast), hoping to keep my mind off things.  I knew nothing about the movie except who the stars were.  But as it began, the song that came on almost immediately cheered me up, not only because of what it said, but because of the singer’s tone.  The movie, as people will have guessed by now, was Moonstruck, a perfect movie to see that night.  (“Papa, I’m getting married.”  “Again?”)

As soon as that song began, I felt better about myself and about life.

Could anyone else have sung that song?  Has anyone else even tried?

Dean Martin had a beautiful voice—as do a lot of Italian crooners—but what made him perfect for That’s Amore was a kind of lilt to his voice, almost as if he’s laughing: a light touch no one else seems to have, but that makes him the perfect singer for another song that, if anything, I like even more: “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head?”  (“I couldn’t feel any better or I’d be sick.”)

I say it again: Could anyone else sing that song that way?  Has anyone tried?

I was crushed—at the age of eight—when the comedy team of Matin and Lewis broke up.  I loved their movies, and figured they got along great.  But as I look back, I can see why Dean wanted out.  He stood there singing beautifully while some guy hung all over him and made fun of the whole thing.  What singer wouldn’t hate that?  I’m sure their break-up was a hard decision because they were pulling in a lot of money, but it turned out to be good for both men.

I loved things Dean did on his own.  I enjoyed the Rat Pack movies, especially Oceans Eleven, and liked the repartee between him and Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.  I also loved the movie “Some Came Running,” in which he played a supporting role—as did Shirley MacLaine—to Sinatra’s starring role, and years later, on my James Jones kick, I actually read all 2,000 pages of the novel, which I also loved, flawed as it was.[1]

One time I was buying a stack of CD’s at a little store in Asheville, and the owner paused when he saw The Best of Dean Martin.  “Wow,” he said, “Dean Martin,” as if to say, who wouldn’t want that?  I’ve played it a number of times, but the best songs are the two I’ve mentioned, which are at the beginning.

Years ago, I was in the Eckhard Drugstore on Broad Street in Durham not long after Martin died.  I was standing in line to buy something when I guy behind me, looking at one of the tabloids, said—in a tone of shocked outrage—”Dean Martin is not dead!”  I turned to him and said, “I’m sorry man.  I hate to be the one to tell you.  He actually is dead.”

The tabloid got it right.  The guy couldn’t believe it.

But at this point I agree.  Dean Martin is not dead.

[1] James Jones has disappeared from view, but I think he is an underrated and important writer, maybe the most interesting novelist I know of on the subject of masculinity.  His war trilogy tells the truth about war, especially in The Thin Red Line, as no other American novelist has ever told it, far better than Hemingway, and though all his work speaks to the subject of masculinity, Go to the Widow Maker is his most interesting novel on that subject, probably a best seller, but never taken seriously by critics.