Sunday, September 30, 2018

Uncle Frank dead and alive--Francis Marion Dougherty


1990 or so photograph of our house under construction


Costner sisters

Ona-- Mary--Euna-- Ethel--Helen

Immortalized in a Sendak book, WE ARE ALL IN THE DUMPS

In a flying newspaper.

Percy (named for Captain Percival)


20 years ago


30 September 1998

Essie 98 / Mother buried.

Breakfast with Madine. Postum [?], sausages, Fiber & Fruit cereal (good)—some white grapes. Dressed in Japan suit. To Cemetery. There Hartsell & [new wife] Wanda, Wilma & son [Elbert’s daughter & her son neither of whom I knew], Lucille Baldwin [wife or widow of one of Ona’s sons], Billy King, Madine bringing Andrew, Alice [Euna’s daughter whom I did not know) & husband, Carol, Sunny, & friend [whose name I did not get]. Hot—an awning but Andrew kept getting in sun. We stood on Daddy to walk by the casket. Brushed flies away to be sure none were in casket. Afterwards to Wister. Essie alone. 98th birthday. Billy came. Vietnam stories. [Billy= Alice Rogers’s son, Essie’s nephew, younger than me but my father’s first cousin, darker than him because his father, Herbert, was Choctaw.]. Off to Poteau. Got 2 more chickens [again, after yesterday] & grapes & milk & ate at 130 at Andrew’s. -Washed off deodorant and changed to jeans. Sd Gdbye & drove to Tulsa. Decided on plan on way.  Retnd rental car to Dollar & got a great break-total of 64 or so—24 hrs & 1 hr plus. Then bk & forth –gate to front ticket counter. 20 min wait but got a very kind woman who put me not on the 6 pm flight to Dallas but the 7 p, so I had an hour to call & cancel Radisson--& then flew to Dallas—long wait on ground. Bought ham & cheese roll & muffin—no food on plane—stuffed with people. Tiny seat. Fat man (very intelligent, in aviation) behind me—Knee caps crushed, neck unsupported. Had called Heddy & Paul—plan to go to Paul’s [in Westwood] --plan to go there & ride up to Morro Bay with them [on their way to Carmel]. Anxious about western flight—took 3 hrs, not two and quarter—found Selby without much trouble. Paul & Danielle up—Danielle getting her supper (back from Houston 28th & at work 10 hrs today). Then a very comfortable featherbed on sofa. Slept. So made it safely to LA despite all the dangers that might come from a moment of fatigue.

Andrew Costner and Martha Izora Costner


Really bad picture of Costner brothers and sisters--Too bad it is not better

In back, Andrew, Lee, Elbert, and Ethel
On extreme left, Euna
Front 3 are Mary, Ona (right in front) and Martha
Helen is not in the picture.

Kevin Hayes and Robert Madison, in Landenberg


Maybe this was year before last or the year before that


HH on Melville Biography--putting things on the record



Looking for Bones? No, Digging up Oil Pipes that went out to the underwater tank they are removing


In Japan


Eric Greitens yesterday--a bad Pacific Seal is hard to get rid of--Oh, maybe it is the red fox that keeps dragging him off


Distressing Attack on No-Dog Beach--Staggered, Nearly Fell

Luckily Tom was right behind me (unknown to me) and helped get the vicious dog away. The woman with the dog apparently had it on a 30 foot leash which was not visible in the air (just trailing on the sand). The dog attacked me and (at almost 83) I staggered sideways and almost fell. Later I saw Frank who was still in his black cast from an attack by the owner of the vicious dog that was lunging at him (the wildest of 4 dogs).

Falling is such a danger to an old person. Dog owners do tend to be irresponsible on the beach.

Biographicizing without Research--Humiliated by Editorial Footnotes to My Talk


This is pretty representative of the way people who write on Melville ignore facts. "The Facts Don't Matter," the Satanic Red-Bearded Stranger shouted from the doorway of the Melville Society Meeting in Chicago in December 1990--the time I gave up attending those meetings. It has only gotten worse.


Todd Richardson


Jo and Harry


Saturday, September 29, 2018

Maybe the best portrait of the mature Sendak?

See the vines that he put into the cover picture of HERMAN MELVILLE: A BIOGRAPHY, Volume 2.

Hayford


HH & Jo


Sealts, Dominique, Hershel


Sealts & Wenke


Andrew Costner and Hershel Parker


Pictures of Gene Gibson 1935-2018 from 1954, Singer, Louisiana





Robert Milder--A reviewer's malice--after I had done more than anyone with Melville's marginalia

See my Index on Marginalia on the right! Reviewing should not be a license to lie. It's Milder at the foot of the first column.


Alice and Gene Costner


Hayford's declaration, in writing. I can't imagine saying that in 1959, but maybe.


Orpha Lee, Everett, Wilburn


Sabrina Parker


Alice Bell Costner, and a note about her ancestors


Costners and 2 Parker children


Maurice Sendak and Hershel Parker --Wilmington DE 1991


Gene Gibson 1935-2018--in Singer, Louisiana KCS Depot 1954

I was the Depot Agent and Telegrapher

Hershel Walker's finest literary achievement


Modern Fiction Studies

John Gerlach. Toward the End: Closure and Structure in the American Short Story. University: U of Alabama P, 1985. 193 pp. $21.50 cloth; pb. $9.95.

What prompted Professor Hershel Walker to write Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons was the misguided, naive, obstinate, inflexible, whimsical, willy-nilly, procrustian, or "adventitious" critical, creative, and editorial theories "which led to the habit of ignoring . . . biographical-textual evidence and its implications." In the course of his book, Parker works hard to define and demonstrate "a textual-aesthetic approach" to the study of American literature and has with good cause and solid evidence directed an ironic and occasionally devastating onslaught against "academic writing on American literature . . . with broad application to literary criticism as practiced by American professors of English, whatever their fields."

Flawed Texts is certain to stir controversy among scholars because the "creative process," whatever that really is, has always been subject to shifting interpretations, some awestruck and grateful, some ignoring the whole business or taking it for granted, most resulting from manifold theories of the day or perhaps merely the time of day. It is frivolous, says Parker, to assume anything other than "all meaning is authorial meaning," which by itself will raise hackles concerning the legitimacy of authorial intentionality, but he also says that it is equally silly to assume "every author retains full authority of anything he has written for as long as he lives." We are teased into "tough thinking" about creativity and literary authority, and Parker calls into question the New Critical intrinsic mentality, some of it "banal" and "vacuous," as it simply refuses to admit the extrinsic facts that writers are real people living in a real world who are sometimes moved to [End Page 721] depend on the fictions of memory in their revisions and who before revision are often held hostage by the very "monsters" they are creating because "no writer can have fully thought something if he cannot then and there express it" and because in the process of "expressing" the writer can be compromised or buoyed in the course of creativity.

Parker leads us through a counting house of flawed texts—books by Faulkner and Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Dreiser and Crane and James and Twain and Mailer—texts analyzed and interpreted and pedestalized and condemned by brilliant men in a maze of ignorance. And he cites frequent and often funny critical gaffes, one critic discounting textual errors saying, "It doesn't really alter my interpretation." We find that Mark Twain "never did" work his original Siamese twins plot to its conclusion in Pudd'nhead Wilson and that a compositional error in an edition of White Jacket ("soiled fish of the sea" in place of "coiled fish of the sea") caused one critical luminary to "rhapsodize" over the twisted imagery that was, after all, never part of Melville's plan.

Parker's humor and chronic good sense make Flawed Texts not only illuminating and challenging but "a good read" as well. His final pages forecast hope for the return of close textual analysis based on the shifting circumstances of time and place, thus dictating that greater attention be focused on historical contingencies and the writer as a human being rather than as an angel or a programmed-for-life word processor.

In his book, Toward the End: Closure and Structure in the American Short Story, John Gerlach of Cleveland State University writes that although he sometimes focuses on short story "endings alone," he is "generally more interested in the way anticipation of endings serves to structure a story as a whole and in the causes of changing views of closure." He admits as he should his obligation to the "injunctions" of Poe, and he quotes Robert Louis Stevenson's declaration that the "body and end of a short story is bone of the bone and blood of the blood of the beginning." He tells us that "closure" is now acceptable literary jargon for "ending," and then, remarkably, he writes this: " . . . the nature and degree of closure has...


Jay Leyda 1986 on his last research trip


Thursday, September 27, 2018

The Park people opened the dunes a few days early so I started the cleanup

Did not see any condoms or condom wrappers today. Did not pick up one large pair of men's undergarments. Did drag out this quilt, after shaking black spiders off the underside.

A Good Long Look at Bart O'Kavanaugh Today

 Well, we certainly got a good look at Bart 0'Kavanaugh today--spiteful, arrogant, aggressive, bullying, self-pitying, repetitious, dogmatic, mean-spirited, and really hateful to one woman in particular, Klobuchar. Insistent, firm women seem to set him off.

Wednesday, September 26, 2018

From The Daily Beast today on THE ISLE OF THE CROSS


It was a story he had heard while vacationing on Nantucket. There was a woman, he was told, who had married a sailor only to be deserted by him. It was perhaps the perfect tale of romance and desperation for the writer to tackle at that time. “As a man abandoned by his public, Melville may have been disposed to be sympathetic toward another loving, responsive young person wrongly abandoned,” scholar Hershel Park[er] wrote in the second volume of his biography of the writer. . . . It was Melville scholar Hershel Parker who unearthed the true nature—and the chosen title—of this lost work by putting together the clues dropped throughout letters and references.

The Daily Beast Uses me Today--Park, Parker, whatever, finder of the title THE ISLE OF THE CROSS


Tuesday, September 25, 2018

Mark Judge can find these AA meetings while he is hiding in Bethany Beach

Mark can be sure that anything said in the rooms will stay in the rooms.

Mariner_s Bethel Methodist Ocean View Presb. Church
Tuesday
10:00 AM






Tuesday
08:00 AM