----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2000 2:02
PM
Subject: got the coffee! not harumphing
at you, Jim!
Yes! I've had my coffee now! (And reclaimed my
pickup truck from the garage with just ONE DAY left to get it
inspected.)
Jim, I wasn't grousing at YOU at all! I was grousing at the
former Mrs. Auster and All her Ilk of either gender. (You've seen my earlier
grousings about the former girlfriend of J.D. Salinger and her cottage website
industry of extortion.)
I have a General Concern with Community, and what I feel are
contemporary trends eroding and breaking down Community. I feel we are
training a whole new generation not to respect or care about issues of
privacy, discretion and trust, we are somehow training them to think that
"keeping secrets" is some variety of dishonesty or lying, that ours will be a
much more honest and New! Improved! society when everything that was ever done
in private later is revealed to the world in its tabloids -- or, in this case,
in upscale hi-tone fiction.
Okay, sometimes (very rarely) it's funny.
Earlier in the USA presidential campaign, a hot rumor
surfaced that in his Wild and Insufficiently Documented Youth, George W. Bush
once attended a wild Superbowl party hosted in Hunter Thompson's hotel room.
When The New Yorker contacted Thompson to Confirm or Deny, he was disgusted:
"You don't expect me to remember every drugged-out Yuppie who vomited in my
bathtub, do you?"
When Simone de Beauvoir first visited America in the 1950s,
her first hostess, Mary McCarthy, couldn't stand her and sent her 1000 miles
away to Chicago with the phone number for the novelist Nelson Algren (whom
McCarthy detested). de Beauvoir and Algren got along GREAT! For several years
she would keep coming back to Chicago carrying on a torrid affair with this
very interesting fellow.
One day Algren read that de Bouvoir had published a new novel
called "les Mandarins," and dutifully trotted down to buy a copy. Back in his
downtown Chicago apartment he was more than a bit dismayed to read many
consecutive chapters about the fictitious French intellectual woman's torrid
multi-year affair with the fictitious Midwestern American novelist -- with a
name something like Belson Elgrin -- in lurid geographical and physical
detail. And that's why the word for these sorts of things is French --
roman a clef.
One thing we don't see much of about GG -- because it's what
the mathematicians call "The Negative Space," the part that's there, but
un-seeable -- are all his friends, relatives and acquaintances who have
Nothing Whatever To Say about GG's private life, thank you very much. But we
do get hints that there were lots of these -- in naive times gone by, they
used to be called Loyal Friends or Discreet People -- and they do not in the
least feel that the mere fact that their friend has died alters in any way the
expectations of privacy they shared with GG while he lived.
Harumph again, but certainly not harumph to Jim.
Bob
Jim Morrison wrote:
> Jim Morrison wrote:
>
> > Hi
Alice,
> >
> > [Lydia] Davis was once married to the
more famous writer Paul Auster
(another writer of obsessives!!) and I
hear that her stories of break up and divorce and
> > based upon
their relationship. But I don't know for sure. I'm just passing
> > along some gossip.
> >
>Elmer Elevator
wrote:
> ick ick ick ick
>
> does no one
anymore have any sense of privacy or trust or discretion?
>
>
marriage and friendship and kinship ought not to be some sort of adjunct
annex > of The Maury Povitch Show. Sorry if things go south, but
whose business is
that? > Are there therapists out there telling
people, "You'll heal better if you
tell > EVERYONE every little
detail of your marriage."
>
> Anybody remember Dory Previn,
who made a cabaret cult act out of her ugly
little > songs about her
nasty divorce from Andre Previn? In fact I insist: If you
OWN Dory
Previn records, raise your hand.
>
> these times suck, where's
the Time Portal to the 18th Century?
>
> Bob / Elmer
>
Hi bob, you may have meant this for the whole list.
Is so, please
forward my response.
You know what, I guess it wasn't the classiest thing I've ever done
to bring up Davis and Auster's marriage, but I do know that there are
a few Auster fans on the list, as well as a few Davis ones, and since
Davis often seems to write about this bad early marriage, I thought it'd
be
worthwhile to mention that she's in some ways writing about Auster
and herself.
People know Auster. People knew Davis. Few seem to know they
were married.
Authors often write about their real lives, so I think Elmer's criticism
may be
a bit too strong. Hopefully Elmer's got some strong coffee
in him by now.
Jim
PS: I'm a believer in biographical information being able to enhance our
appreciation of art. Art after all comes from human beings who are
at least
partially conditioned by their environment, family,
relationships, etc.
It's not necessary to know the details of the
artist's lives to appreciate
their
work, but how many
of us
don't actively seek out information on the artists we love?
If I can
bring Gould into this little post, I'd like to defend our interest
in
Lydia Davis and Paul Auster's marriage as being related to our interest in
Gould
having never married, or our wondering on just who that beautiful
girl is
that he mentions in one of his letters.
Bye,
Jim (who neither has nor knew about the Previn songs, though will now try
to
track them down. Thanks for the recommendation,
Elmer)