NYT this A.M., review (by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt) of Michael Reynolds, Hemingway, The Final Years, subtitled, "Looking for a cause for Hemingway;s descent":

                "Tellingly, Mr. Reynolds describes a scene during World War II in which Hemingway encounters a psychiatrist who is probing soldiers for signs of battle fatiguw.  Mr Reynolds writes:" Fellow journalist Bill Walton remembered the pyschiatirst calling courage and cowardliness false values with which people kidded themselves.  An argument developed, which led to the pyschiatrist saying, 'Every damn one of you is going to break sooner or later...Including you, Hemingway!'"

                Mr Reynolds quotes Walton: "Hemingway exploded.  He flushed deep red and pounded on the table so hard the  wine bottle jumped around...The captain was an ignoramus, an uneducated fool, a pervert, an enemy spy, and anything else unpleasant he could think of...something that was very deep in him had been touched.  He couldn't forget it'."

                It is a measure of the power that Hemingway's persona still exerts that just for a moment you agree with his judgement of that psychiatrist.  Even his sad and esperate end still evokes some sense of heroism, the shaking of a fist in the faces of cruel gods. (p. B9) "

          

Here we have the crux of the connundrum puzzling my will of late; the getting right ot the brink of realization and then pulling back into the safety of the old, tired and trite cynicism posing as "existentialism"...

           Related is the film Eyes Wide Shut, which I caught last night with my buddy President Emiritus of our Dorothy Day Philosophers' Table...Great scene of all the Secret Cabal's Darth Vaders (most likely including my allegedly real Old Man, "C.P.," for whose Sins I've been punished over the last decade without respite) holding their Little Boys Gone Bad High Mass...(the "shaking of a fist" business a mish-take, as, in our arrogance of youth, we always think that God is somehow wrong and my Luciferean Ego right, the Marlowe the Unnaturally Smooth-Cheeked Puer and his EYE-know dissemblingas a good widdle boy entitled to ALL da toys...

New addition, 7/27/99: I was looking for my take on Dante--the image of Judas Iscarot, down in the lowest Circle of the Inferno, with the Cozzeners and othe Betrayers ...But I could not find...One of my Rudra Rant's (all done for you, as now I look at them with curious detachment and think, How interesting--NOT sch-too-pid, but prescient in a way that will never cease to amaze me...the "words" almost indeed "not my own" but really "bestowed by the Muses"...

Just a few other connecting thoughts...(With a "hopeful" prayer that I'm not boring you with a "dangling conversation," as Ms Joan Baez sang last night with Dar Williams at the KPFA benefit)

For Pat and Terry, I indeed "put in an appearance"; I stopped by "Camp KPFA" on my way into work and had a talk with Daniel, a fellow writer--who told me that Joan Baez's tour bus had just pulled into the Berkeley Community Theater...

I told him a funny story that came to mind; all the good feelings of summertime/early fall at the Greek Theatre for "Bread and Roses," the folkie fundraiser enabling musicians to tour prisons and hospitals that Mimi Farina, sister to Ms. Baez, put so much time and energy into when I was doing my "Committee for Arts and Lectures" gig for Econ classmate Steve Roth (last heard of having become a stockbroker in Manhattan, calling up his old KALX DJ pals with his first "million dollar commission check" allegedly in hand a few years back)...

*MIDI sounds of Bob Dylan, I don't know how it all got started, I don't know what they do with their lives... But me I'm still on the road...   

So, one year--and there were only a few, from around 1975 to 1980, before alleged "lack of interest" switched the venue to comedy--backstage is abuzz with hoopla, hoopla...mystery guest...gonna be Bob, man...

After I finish up my lightweight duties backstage (kind of a "babysitter to the stars" with a walkie-talkie, no complaints on my part), I go out to Guest Seating and meet up with Amy...She's dying to know Did ya see him? Is he here?...In my best pre-hard-mocking "cynical cool" (I did indeed notice the resemblance to myself in my younger days by this Hip-hop guy at the KPFA benefit, "Spear-Head" (or something like that, myself faintly amused at how I used to be called "Spearchucker" in High School) I told her, softly, because we were a lot kinder to one another in those "ancient" days, No Amy, c'mon, since when did you become a celebrity gawker...

Just then, the "crowd goes wild!" Onto the stage struts a dude with that charismatic machismo of Our Man Bob [Dylan]...Amy gives me her "superior smile"...

The jaunty, almost arrogant notes from the harp strapped around the neck beneath the dark fedora hat begin...

Even the beginning vocals have got us all fooled, cheering in lemming-like feeding frenzy...

Then the hat comes off and all this black beautiful hair falls free...It's Joan Baez, indeed the "mystery guest"...

Years later, I still remember something about a coupla diehard fans insisting she continue on as "Bob, man" (and the look on her sweet face--just a trace of "what    in the world" disturbing her angelic features...)

All I can say, after seeing and hearing again last night, is "You're Aging Well" is too understated; her voice, having picked up a bit of a throaty roar (from timeworn cares, perhaps), went through me in complete melodic harmony on her solo, a beautiful spiritual about "peace and rest finally"...(Nobody else on the bill even came close to that talent...Too much a lost art, I'm afraid, she's just too accomplished a "perfectionist" in her art...Or something like that...) Gotta run, tom

    Further ruminations on the nature of Why Are We Here?...

    Usually said facetiously, but in the subject line's usage, a very "realistic" and painfully *humble* take...

    Had a chance to chat with Ms. Brenda Webster, of "PEN West," who sponsored that reading at "Black Oak Books" of the "new writers"; though I admittedly found the affair an ordeal, the intent was noble...(She'd mentioned something about the difficulties of publishing, *these days*, at which everyone nodded enthusiastically). She's getting me to join PEN, though I failed to get her to subscribe to the Berkeley Rep.  Very much appreciated her take on publishing, as well, she was explaining her difficult fininacial picture due to "editorial inconsistency," i.e., her memoirs that she's "shopping around," as the saying goes, are having a wee bit of difficulty finding "a good home."

    My explanation of the "annoying" way that her editors have of doing 180-degree flip-flops (out of panic, she said) on What in the World Do You Want From Me? has, of course, to do with my gripe from years back--early 80's--as part of the Media Alliance "hard-charging up-and-comers" (though now on The Road to Nowhere...).
***MIDI sounds of Elvis Costello's "Oliver's Army"...

The MBA's are on their way...

Looking at the even harder and more cynical publishing world now, with the "glinting eyed" look of all those Philistine *fustilarians*, committee after committee, the "old boy indifference" of  huge walnut/teak tabletops behind large, oaken, closed doors having been subtly replaced  by what Moira Moynihan termed *Stalinoid Dementia*, a "new and improved!" version of the rigid fascism of "shunning" as peculiarly practiced by our Puritan/Shaker predecessors in this misappropriated land now done even at places like KPFA (?!?). The station is one that I rarely listen to--preferring KFOG, from not only all those wonderful years of "The Morning Show," with Dave Morey, Scoop Nisker and even "Trish the Dish," but too the infamous "Dung Boy" and the "Sunday Night Idiot Show" that got me through many a slow night of hacking the "impersonally" mean Streets of Oaktown--yet, as the saying goes, from ancient, more civilized  times, one whose right to Freedom of Expression a matter I'd defend until dead...

   So, bits and pieces, particles enlivening again, a bit reluctantly, but without fail, in search of That Greater Paradigm--a big joke to most, but done in the same exact way as a big leafy tree in this most wondrous Summertime...the leaves in the freshest green possible, reaching in the most graceful and *airily* splendour towards the sunshine all about (not thinking of the "setting sun world" of mechanical physics and *entropy*, the *mish-taken* notion of "getting to old for that" seizing up the more *hide-bound* among us)...With the remembrance, too, that an "even greater moment" almost always exists, despite the arbitrary limitations of *chronological* time, as at 11:40 tomorrow the Sun's *potentia* will be slightly greater than it was at 11:41 today--i.e., "now"...

    Only our "self-blinded" eyes, devoid of luminosity now, from too many years of "envy" in all it's "wicked greatness" as "Power To Be" (in *its* default mode of "deny, discredit, diss-troy" having made one's "inferiority complex" superior through that Old Black Bag of "devillishly clever" Machievellian hijinks) cause us to "miss the boat"...(and limit ourselves--see the article about over-50 athletes this A.M. in the Chron)

   Sitting on the Avenue, sipping an expresso, remembering, perhaps, like Leanard Michaels, now in exile in Italy, and his poignant 70's memoirs of Berkeley, yesterday, remembering...Like being in love, in Vienna, late morning strong coffee and very heavy cream with Claudia; all the "dark-featured" beautiful women langorously walking by--heightening our love in a most wondrous way...

   Caught the new Star Wars--heard that Yoda's intriguing eyes were computer generated after mine own (nicest compliment that I have ever heard...)

much love,
Tom