Smart novelists

I think the best novelists are perhaps necessarily not the smartest ones. It's the ones who find pleasure in representing what's a challenge to make beautiful. I don't believe Tolstoy was a genius, as in all-around smart guy. I feel he recognized he had a genius FOR a certain kind of expression and this helped him tackle some of the preoccupations (with theories of history etc) that he was less genius at. Novelists for example like Iris Murdoch, William T. Vollman, maybe Richard Powers, strike me as so innately and broadly intelligent that their work is arid in some basic way: it wants to be a philosophical treatise, an encyclopedic history etc, instead of a story told with some representational acumen as a way for the author to see and make communion with an imagined readership, which is what those with this limited gift accomplish, writing books that live.


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art = eloquence about something loved

could be the meanest, roughest subject, but this holds true I think

Tgiving

Hart given foxtail and alligator skirt; tossing doll twice into chandelier; Sevi doing puzzles. Twice walking perimeter of wet meadow; fox sighting; relaxed feast w Esty burns Adrien G&G

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Idea: bear

Talking at dinner party with friends about a bear, and the friends don't know what bear means.


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Silly Billy

Book: Ethan Frome

A powerful page-turner with such a vivid premise.  The ending to me is a caricaturish violation, a real letdown.  If that's any indication of Wharton's strengths as a writer I wouldn't bother with the longer works.

Book: Essays by Wallace Shawn

Striking in the way it makes you think about the war, about the bubble of the elites.  Committed to truthfulness, engagingly written.  Turned me on to Mark Strand.  Ends on kind of a week note about Shawn's sex writing, about which we're supposed to be familiar?  As to being understood and acceptance, it does come back to me that I simply failed to stay awake during the Designated Mourner--couldn't make it through that.  Still, Shawn is one of a kind--you feel as if you know him and count him among the most valued friends.

Movie: Little Dieter Needs to Fly

finally saw this--magnificent.

Albert Finney

struck me after watching Miller's Crossing again, first time in probably a decade,  Finney at that age would have been perfect for Beecher.  Who else today is like him?

Seeking Water, Seeking Shelter

Dutch meal at Old First, rabbit, spoon bread etc, Kids loved it

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Test

Ok




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the more you ARE something

the more you AREN'T something else...reified one way, open to error and attack