Noctambulate

Kristi Noem misattributing a paraphrase of Rudyard Kipling to George Orwell really does sum it all up huh

Reading James Wolcott on John Updike in the new LRB. He marvelously piths the Rabbit Angstrom series as “the Raj Quartet of American torpor.”

I haven’t read a bad book in your own series: “The Bitter Roots” is the one I have lined-up next.

Yes. One always hesitates, for that reason. McNally has, I think, done a really good job of resurrecting smart and non-doctrinaire British mid-century feminist voices: Caroline Blackwood Dinah Brooke, Kay Dick, Margaret Kennedy, Penelope Mortimer. There are others on their list I want to get to.

“She did not realize that she had been educated in a very old tradition: that of the sensitive courtesan to whom the luxury of idle days is the very breath of life.” As romance fades, desire persists in John Broderick’s THE PILGRIMAGE

“And with that began the long exquisite education of the senses, which once acquired can never be forgotten even at the end of a long life. . . . It was as though a semi-blind child were suddenly granted sight: impossible to imagine the world in darkness again.” THE PILGRIMAGE

“‘Never forget honey,’ Howard said, ‘that you think with your pores.’” — in John Broderick’s THE PILGRIMAGE (1960), an American businessman tutors a young Irish woman in the arts of seduction

Thinking back on Laxness' A PARISH CHRONICLE which tells the common story of the dissolution of a small church, but sees the "congregation" as geographic, timeless — stretching from the tenth century Viking Egil to corporate Lutherans — and composed as much of ghosts, sheep, and cod as humans.

Found amid a rich patriarch's legacy: "There were boxes of rusty nails found on the road or pulled from rotten planks. He also left a considerable quantity of old bread, from relatively freshly moldy bread to bread from the previous century that had long since begun to petrify." A PARISH CHRONICLE

Today should be your 38th birthday.. When you lose your son you lose more than a child you lose a piece of your heart and your joy. Life is forever altered, and nothing can ever fill that space. Yet in my soul, he remains, my precious boy, forever loved. His laughter, his smile, and his love are woven into who I am. My love for him will never fade. Yor are my pride and my joy - you've made a change that cannot be broken..

Alex's mom on his 38th birthday.

Spontaneous political resistance in Haldør Laxness’ A PARISH CHRONICLE: “Unplanned meetings took place in undisclosed places. No one exhorted anyone to anything, and in fact, no account was ever given of the conspiracy . . . but everyone felt that something started stirring the nation’s soul.”

In mid-century Iceland, per Haldør Laxness, weak coffee is disdainfully termed “washed-knickers water” for its resemblance to the graywater drained from baths, the dish sink, and the laundry tub. A PARISH CHRONICLE

“They never walked straight and never bent-backed, but there was no denying they stooped slightly at the knees. . . . It is a wonder men so unadept at walking should spend their lives competing in a long-distance race with swiftly bounding sheep.” Haldør Laxness, A PARISH CHRONICLE

Simenon’s THE BURIAL OF MONSIEUR BOUVET is an elaboration on one of his most familiar “roman durs” plots, which he returns to like a reoccurring dream — a man picks up stakes and deserts his life, family, and social connections to build an alternate, often criminal existence.

“Their window was opened on the blue of the evening. All the windows of Paris were open. In some parts of town people slept on their balconies and throughout the night they could hear from every direction the whistles of the trains in the stations.” Simenon, THE BURIAL OF MONSIEUR BOUVET

THE BURIAL OF MONSIEUR BOUVET was written in 1950 while Simenon was staying in California (Carmel-by-the-Sea). Yet, as always, he carries the sounds and smells of Paris vividly in his head:

“It was the hour for aperitifs and all the little cafés of Paris smelled of anise.”

In Simenon’s THE BURIAL OF MONSIEUR BOUVET, the fifteen year old, already plotting his escape, despises a precious family photo album: “No one ever thinks of keeping a cemetery in the cupboard. Corpses on the first page! Corpses on the following pages! Then people who aren’t quite dead but almost.”

So decent and generous. Thanks for this tribute.

The old, dogged detective Beaupére in Simenon’s THE BURIAL OF MONSIEUR BOUVET: “That was enough for him. Now he could keep on walking about, go into little shops, into the loges of concierges, tenacious, asking his eternal questions, as impervious to rebuffs as a salesman for vacuum cleaners.”

The lozenge-sucking, flat-footed working class investigator in Simenon’s THE BURIAL OF MONSIEUR BOUVET is truly a pedestrian detective: walking nearly everywhere, avoiding taxis and even the Metro, doggedly asking questions of everyone he encounters.

“He didn’t blush because the blood never circulated hotly enough in his veins to reach the surface of his skin, but his lips trembled slightly.” In Simenon’s THE BURIAL OF MONSIEUR BOUVET, a self-consciously working class detective finds himself under interrogation by a reserved socialite.

In Simenon’s THE BURIAL OF MONSIEUR BOUVET, the corpse of the deceased loner seems to be playing a kind of private joke on his survivors: “the skin had become whiter, almost diaphanous and the vague smile that had hovered on his lips had grown more definite and become almost sarcastic.”

All serious historical novels are works of speculative fiction, even ones set in the ‘60s and ‘70s. These three are absolutely brilliant.

Howells’ A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES (1889) as a reverie of complex, polyglot America at the turn of the century. Basil and Isabel March exchange the social, economic, and cultural certainties of Boston for the lively, diverse roil of New York City’s streets and its perilous economic possibilities.

"We can't go back! There's no farm anymore to go back to. The fields is full of gas wells and oil wells and hell holes generally; the house is tore down, and the barn's goin'" The irreversible devastation wrought by monetary gain in William Dean Howells' A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES

“The girl laughed. . . . Like everyone else, she was not merely a prevailing mood, as people are apt to be in books, but was an irregularly spheroidal character, with surfaces that caught the different lights of circumstance and reflected them.” William Dean Howells, A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES

In William Dean Howells’ A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES, New Yorkers have a wardrobe of multiple social personae: “By this time, Beaton was in possession of one of those other selves of which we have several about us, and was again the laconic, staccato, rather worldified young artist.”

Notably surreal hat and necklace combination . . .

“They forget death, Basil; they forget death in New York.” William Dean Howells, A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES

Of the AI-like technical object in Qntm’s THERE IS NO ANTIMEMETICS DIVISION: “The whole thing, the entirety of human ideatic space is being torn apart. Everything becomes corrupted . . . Its malevolent gravity drags humanity and all human ideas into its orbit, warping them beyond recognition.”