Shakespeare:

"...that in black ink my love may still shine bright.”

NYT, 1 March *93:

article abt doubts oh accuracy of PBS film “The Liberators,** abt 76lst Tank Battalion, black WWII unit, being at liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald.

byline, Richard Bernstein.

"Many critics, however, argue that the film went seriously awry in its depiction of the liberations of Buchenwald and ^achau. They coirplain that the moral edifice embodied in remembrance can crumble if history is handled casually, or distorted to fit current needs....

example of unmanageable fact:

when the dog attacked me* "Oh, you're wearing a hat," the woman scolded me (as she tried to restrain him). "He doesn't like hats."

That the dog didn't like hats was indisputably proven. That I was supposed to have laiown and acted accordingly...

names of characters:

Call them Ishmael, Flem Snopes, Rosacoke Mustian, Lord Jim, Raskalnikov ( ICkens1 characters and getting them from church register)•••

possible NYTBR essay, autumn '87, on how the names of fictional characters register with us?

--I was embarassingly old when C’s mom cited the biblical Ishmael, "every man's hand against me : I didn *t know my Bibie that well and she didn’t know Moby D that well, hit between us**#

J

--Steinbeck: Caleb and Aaron(?), like Cain and Abel, in East of Eden: the JC figure m Grapes of Wrath s B

title for chapter on titles: God's Tricycle

—basis: the three titles—Guy Davenport's "DaVinci's Bicycle,” a 1985(?) B'way piay "Faulkner's Bicycle," and a book about the old, "Tolstoi's Bicycle"; God's Tricycle goes them one wheel better. "You tell me* are you here reading, thusy far, because you have nothing better to do, or are you waiting to see how this title is justified?"

—scenarios it suggests• God as child on a trike; God in retirement home... on if C* croOt' ^ CMA. J

—other title stuff: when working on'This House of Sky and describing it to Louise at PNW Experiment Station, telling her it was about my father and our sheep ranching days she said, "oh, yeah* The Old Man and The Sheep."

Simon/Garfukkel lyric, Bleeker St, on one of our albums

I saw a shadow touch a shadow’s hand (check this)

Mistah Chekov, he dead

The Success of the ’President's Men*

NY Times, Sunday, July 13, 1986

Section 3, Business, p. 1 & 8

Filed in Carol’s Watergate file, mass media course*

ch. on dedications?

Gjcrvsa<.dts**~4 *K wAvlAAArU4*r^

k UJU^

I li&^QV& yoa should t have to be a tinsel-haired movie star, or an overpaid JlA jzjbtflrlju tj> ...

athlete, or a discredited and defrocked politician, toj^iave your story told f> On/sH-c (jrvvii t o 3ooks of that sort I thinkTi*!^prove to be, in historical in this

*

Ccra^X^xi . A aooiety* (j

and literary terms, just a kind of dandruff of society p (Bu^Jstories such as /Vj&Sja/uj tome‘AJUtJC*njjJ+\

of his life, Swan's, of ajpioneer who virtually every day for forty year iTwroJ

C&NL'^ Northwest and the life of thbvwhite westcomers and theVhoastal Indians around him, I think

’ - A .lA*o4. r\M*JLr ^ w*r3» - those stories from theXbloodstream of this country• They're a kind of pulse

of ourjpast^ fe Aa-vAe*, 1Q ‘CAA+Y^.J

ch# on memoirs?

—see Wider World (Kate Simon) card

Wider World^ , I^Jtx $

—changeling time of life —±R this 000-page bk has more unrequited love than anything since 00 —In this strange era when conspicuous consumption preoccupies the private sector and budgetary cheese-psring is preached as national statecraft, you have towDnder at the changes of today's -^ate Simons*.• —What is plain is tense the vital alchemy that public education has beai...

The First Man, Albert Camus, title phrase on p. 195: "♦.♦wandering through the night of the years in the land of oblivion where each one is the first man, where he had to bring himself up, without a father..#”

Albert Camus *s "Notes and Sketches" in back of The First Han, p. 300? "Rescue this poor family from the fate of the poor, which is to disappear from history without a trace. The Speechless Ones#

"They were and they are greater than I# p. 301 "He (the fictional young Camus) leaves heme as anadolescent in order to sleep alorg."

detail from The First Man, Albert Camus, p. 252: "...the Cormerys naturally being far ahead of timef as the poor always are, for they have few social obligations and pleasures, and are afraid of not being punctual for those few."

(David Remley, review at* Sky, Western American literature)

The book is one that urges facing the past, knowing the old people,

faith is that knowing them we may also define ourselves...

Ideas notebook entry:

books that not only stand up over time, but continue to march, cavort

and sing rowdily*

Heart Earth (card 2 of 3^ , Mayakovsky-Brik letters)

1U9—M to B from Paris to Moscow, 1925$ M flew—evidently to Paris or at least some of this trip—with a pilot named Shebanov: Hmrmfld his tail at every border*" *#* This seems to be the same kind of whimsical dip or jounce that navigators like to do at imaginary lines; Scott Reeburgh on our flight to Anaktuvuk bounced the bush plane at the crossing of the Arctic Circle, for instance, and Mike the mate on my voyage down aboard the Alpha Helix said something, perhaps as the vessel went over a big roller, about that being the Canadian border. (This is probably more precisely told in my Alpha nalix diary or notbs.) All this is kind of Medicine line stuff; would it fit with the point that the borders of western states do make a difference, that the states indeed are kind of cylinders of specific cultures, outlooks, pasts?

also lU9s M: "It really is the back of beyond* Even beyond the back of beyondJ"

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memory handles the past with heavy mittens on, occasionally

fumbling onto a treasure while letting all else drop.

7?,^4 .There is the difference between memory and reverie.

winter

To step out here to the edge of the continent and try our equilibrium, see if we can balance like boys on edge of tenement roof. Some of us can't, and they (their bodies) drop from the Golden Gate and the^ Aurora (and Portland's equivalent) Bridges, or into lifelong funk.

Some among us are true rcpe-dancers—mtn climbers, long-distance sailors, pilots ...edge-dancers, and come to their sought grief...

the uses of resentment:

—mine at all tte time spent, in Grandma*s company, with the Ringers; part of that was a more gene rad resentment about the time not being put to use; diddling away in talk instead of reading, for ex; and the lack of fact in all the gossip and storying being done.

—Eiseley, famous man of the long view, shows resentment in An the Strange Hours (about abandonment by his schoolhood chum—"The better” ch.)

—Kipling in his stories about brother and sister in cruel boarding situation#

—thin(?) (maybe it*s substantial?) border between resentment and hate

00 Solitaire

—my working w/ file cards

from Ideas notebooks

Joseph Conrad, Joan Baez, and the Hutterites: what they have in common

is an unawareness of impossibility} sense of craft5 and they are unembarrassed#

from Ideas notebook:

the dilemma of someone like Grandma, when faced with the Joslin-Badgett

habit of calling each other by last name. (G*ma was comfortable calling

people "Mrs." or by first name, but not this affectation.)

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12 March Dear Jerry—

X was hugely heartened about the Doig background when you sent the excerpt about the fastidious, sophisticated one in Berton stook. A lot better than the Borebear back in Scotland, a provost of rechin, who inspired the local ditty i

” Provost Doig*s dead, God be thankits Many a better dog*s dead, since he was whelpit."

Yup, I did hear about Dave Walter*s honorary, very nice, virtue finally rewarded. ^ .. , _

Hope you*re wintering through okay, and that we can cross paths you later this year. with

■ /

!-/

all best,

chapter—perhaps on my turn toward writing fiction?—using Sea Runners journal?

alternate title: Shelf Life

Widow Lines

—on editing? what stays, what goes?

—on scenes that don*t fit, but are kept for later? ^Grasshopper poisoning*)

--on good stuff from interviews or research that just never fits?

It's not as if all this (writing) was taking place in an aquarium. The writer floating dreamily all day long in the fluid of thought and word, and at supper tine the figure of God—in the unlikely disguise of a literary critic—drops in the fish food to him. (the point being, books have to sell, have to be caused to sell.)

This doesn't go as far as Samuel Johnson did, in his famous saying that "nobody but a blockhead ever wrote but for money •" (check exact quote) A i0t of people have, and have made big marks in the world while Dr. Johnson amounts to a smug footnote. (Or creation of his press agent, the first of that ilk, Boswell.) Karl Marx, with Das Kapital; poet/heir James Merrill; Winston Churchill; Wallace Stevens, Wm Carlos Williams...