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June 18th, 2004
I did get on the train to visit Charles (and Clive got on the plane). A word to those visiting unwell friends on Bloomsday: don’t even suggest reading from Ulysses. I did read a few chapters on the train and remembered that it was the domestic bits that really enthrall me.
Went to the nurse practitioner this morning, who I decided is definitely a lesbian, which made me like her even more; we spoke about dogs and sagging breasts. Then had misgivings, while walking through that piss poor park near Friends Seminary, that if knowing someone is a lesbian makes you like them more, is that not somewhere along the same spectrum as people who like people less if they discover them to be a lesbian. I think this useless thinking may be attributed to the heat. I say piss poor park because at the moment I am enduring one of those acute episodes of geographical infidelity. Periodically I awake from the fact that I live here convinced that I have slept through a whole existence that was meant to take place in verdure, simplicity, and relative quiet. The park in question seems to allude to a space reminiscent of the Tuileries, but it leaves me dissatisfied even with its fountain limping bravely in the heat. Grandiose notions in small quarters. Poor park seems dislocated too, or perhaps I just judge it harshly because I feel that way this month.
June 16th, 2004
Yesterday was a day when mortality seemed to shift a little closer. Clive phoned to say that Charles had had a stroke in Newhaven. Only last week Charles was sitting on table 42, grinning and reminding me that the world is bigger and more full of people that I care about than I had thought of late. Laura played in the first wd-50 game of Bocce at Washington Square Park and revealed to us all before work that there had been a dead body on a nearby bench throughout their game; eventually the designated services for dead body removal did arrive. She photographed the Bocce court and the bagged up dead body with her new cell phone. We laughed and felt awful in the way that one does about dead bodies. I thought it mindful of Charles to have had his stroke in Newhaven rather than London, the US being the best place to suffer any medical crisis if you have the advantage of some form of insurance. Clive wanted me to get on a train to Newhaven because he thinks I’m very sane in a medical crisis. When I got past the flattery, which admittedly took a few hours, I began to wonder why Clive hadn’t got on a plane to Newhaven. Later I concluded, somewhat obviously, that Clive’s reluctance to get on a plane was not the point. Someone should be there, apart from the friend Lucy – currently living in Newhaven - who was not good in a medical crisis, and he had asked me to be there.
Today is Bloomsday. I always try to read a little of Ulysses on this day, preferably out loud and in relative privacy rather than at some official festivity that smacks of a new religion. This anniversary, the centenary of the date of Leopold Bloom’s wanderings about Dublin, is being feted in Dublin with both hysteria and skepticism. Observing this peculiar combination - a new economic and social glee currently rampant in Dublin coupled with our old love of begrudgery - would, I suspect, have greatly amused Joyce.
I think perhaps I should get on the train to Newhaven, with a copy of Ulysses, find Charles and read him some of that book. He has an excellent, if somewhat obscure, sense of humour.
June 2nd, 2004
Relatively recently I had the sensation of having been young for too long. It has now passed.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
May 26th, 2005
I'm sitting in bed reading a cookbook and missing Steve Doughton. (I seem to recall Martin Amis citing the reading of cookbooks in bed by wives as a reason to dissolve a marriage). So much of the pleasure of cooking is dependent on the enthusiasm of those who eat the food you have prepared. Steve is a very excited diner and I find myself cooking less, partly because of work, but also because he now lives on another coast. The work thing is very disappointing. You work in a restaurant and you never cook a meal. I cook for the dog, she is a selective diner and I’m still figuring out her preferences, but when I present her with a bowl that she devours it reminds me of feeding Steve. There is pride, delight, and a very fundamental pleasure in nourishing another creature. Christine laughed at me when I told her this, “hah, I used to cook for Guthrie too.” I haven’t been able to locate a piece of mutton (old sheep) in Manhattan. We fed this to our dogs and to ourselves in Ireland, it is good, inexpensive protein that can be rendered delicious with a pressure cooker. Where do all the old sheep go?