October 18, 2010. Monday.
Situation: I just have piddling work to do, so I postpone it until at least tomorrow. I try to call DUI management officer Jolene to schedule a DUI class, but there’s only a message telling me she's out because of a family problem, although the message tells me she’s supposed to be back on the 18th. I haven’t been able to schedule a class for the whole year of my probation, and it’s getting very worrisome. Moi, oddly, has a job to do. While she’s out of the house, I take advantage of her absence. When she gets home about quarter to four, I stop what I’m doing to take Mway for her walk.
State of the Path: Mway teases some of the chickens and takes a dip in her pool. I pick up the long crooked stick. Leaves lie on the ground around the pool from the maple, the ground’s wet. There’s rain water on the weeds, though I have no idea when it rained. I see about twenty little birds in the trees and bushes around the cedar, and get a good view of a couple of them. “Damn, these must be black-capped chickadees,” I think to myself, but then I hear a bird calling “Tow-hee, tow-hee,” and I begin to wonder if they are towhees. (I check in Audubon: the towhees look nothing like what I saw, so either I heard, but did not see, a towhee or two or else chickadees also sing “tow-hee” – although I’m not completely happy with the photo of the black-capped chickadee in the book either, and I’m beginning to doubt that’s what I saw.) Down by the creek, I see some more of these birds then hear a bird pecking in a tree, though I can’t sight it. The lady’s thumb leaves have turned a dark red. The dayflower plants are scraggly but still up, their leaves striped brown – they never did get any flowers. I walk across the plank at the feed channel, face forward again, and with two long sticks I can kind of support myself from both sides of the ditch. The same gnat-like bugs I saw yesterday spring out of the goldenrod. The oaks down by this end of the creek are redder. As I walk along the ridge, looks to me like the “chokeberries” have lost all their berries, many have also lost their leaves. Past the strawberry patch, I take the path up to the summer house, simply because it’s there now – hear the stumps of goldrenrod stalks crumple and break as I walk on them. Up at the summer house, I look at the brown, tattered puffball. Surprised to see Mway here poking around in the weeds. To get to the clearing, we have to walk back toward the strawberry patch, then take a sharp left through more goldenrod.
State of the Creek: Water trickles at the rock cascades. The pools are calm, rusty brown, soupy. Down by the crest of the skating pond, fallen oak leaves lie splattered across the rocks and the water.
The Fetch: Up at the clearing, I move into a different section of taller goldenrod, Mway smiling and prancing along beside me eagerly to see where I’m finally going to stand. I toss the stick from where I’m standing in the goldenrod to another section of taller goldenrd near the sumacs, so Mway pretty much has to plow through goldenrod to get the stick and bring it back A couple times she takes about a half a minute to extract the stick from the weeds, and I wonder if there’s a bush in the weeds I can’t see and the stick’s getting stuck in. Finally I’m just standing there while she’s messing around in the weeds and the wait gets too long, so I walk over to see what’s the matter. I don’t see any bush that the stick could have got stuck in, and Mway is just sitting there chomping and gowling at it. I tell her, “Okay, that’s enough. Let’s go.” She drags the stick out of the weeds and drops it, but I’m already on the path ten feet in front of her, and finally she just picks it up and follows, passing me when the path gets wide enough for her to do so.
3 comments:
Your idea to use these four men as characters in your novel sounds good to me. I suppose you’ll be writing an alternative history with them in Australia. Just one problem for you to consider: Joyce died on January 13, 1941, and the most notable events in Monk’s and Davis’s lives occurred after that. For the sake of plausibility, you will have to have Joyce meet a fourteen-year-old Davis and a Monk in his early twenties. You can do this I suppose, but you will be restricted with the biographical material you can incorporate into your novel.
I’ve already thought about this age problem. Since I’m writing an alternative history, as you call it, I might as well alternate another fact of history, which will form the background to my novel. It’s this: James Joyce did not die on January 13, 1941, but rather faked his funeral on that date so that he could live incognito, free from public pressure, in order to come up with an idea for another novel after Finnegans Wake. Indeed, the search for inspiration is what motivates him to venture to Australia. He realizes that he has exhausted his homeland as a source of artistic material, so after ten years or so of writer’s block, he travels to a place he’s judged to be “simultaneously as close to, and as far away from, Ireland as possible.” He brings his former secretary, Samuel Beckett, with him as a sounding board for ideas. Beckett, although by this time having written much of his major work, including Waiting for Godot, has yet to meet any financial success, and he willingly accompanies Joyce for the money. Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis have arrived in Australia as the result of a failed Jazz Ambassadors tour. Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Clarke, and Oscar Pettiford have managed to board an airplane back to the United States, but the pianist and trumpeter failed to make the departure and have no money to book a second flight. The Korean War rages on the 38th parallel. MM.
Re-reading the comment above (I’ve been re-reading my entire blog since I made the final post last year – what else have I got to do?), I’m struck by the similarity between MM’s strategy of having Joyce fake his death and the stunt that Flann O’Brien pulls in his novel The Dalkey Archive, where Joyce, though supposedly dead, makes an appearance as a bartender. Did MM get her idea from the Larry Fine of 20th century Irish novelists? To her credit I don’t think she did – or she would have mentioned it, and, furthermore, I don’t think she has read any Flann O’Brien. The copy I have of his Complete Novels is in a bookcase in my bedroom, and I’ve never seen any evidence that she’s pulled it off the shelf. Less to her credit, I don’t think MM has ever given more than a cursory reading of Beckett’s work. For in the mud, where is that assiduous father, Moran, or his housekeeper, Martha, or that tenacious couple, Moll and Macmann? – not to mention Marguerite or Madeleine, caretaker of Mahood – for that matter, where’s Molloy? The significance of these remarks will be apparent later. In fact, in general, I don’t think MM is as well read as she lets on. She once remarked that she hasn’t read “all” my books, implying that she’s read most of them – but I bet she hasn’t read half, or even a third, of them. I would have seen more evidence if she had. Shakespeare, for example. If she had pulled my Riverside Shakespeare off the shelf, I would have found it on the floor, for there’s no way she could have lifted it back on the shelf – and I don’t remember ever having the volume lying around open during the time she’s been reading. I think her entire knowledge of Shakespeare – and probably most of what she knows – comes solely from the World Book encyclopedia (and perhaps more recently wikipedia). And next to the Riverside Shakespeare is the Annotated Alice. If MM had read this book, with its protagonist following a rabbit down a rabbit hole, surely this would have been one of her favorite books, and she would have mentioned it, especially during our interview. And talking about favorite books, why shouldn’t The Unnamable, where it’s so subtly revealed that the urned Mahood lives in front of a “chop-house,” where cattle are regularly slaughtered, be as exciting to her, if she had read it, as Ulysses? And she does not seem to be aware even of Teddy, the central character of Molloy.
Post a Comment