We had never seen HOWARD'S END and were all set to love it tonight

It is embarrassing to admit, but we suffered through 25 minutes before giving up. I just looked at a plot summary online and an HAPPY that we did not suffer a couple of hours more. I am pretty sure watching the whole dreary thing would have given me a relapse, if I am far enough out of the Virus to have a relapse.
It's a terrible thing not to adore something that intelligent people love.

Azure Parking Lot closed

My fantasy has been getting strong enough to drive down to the parking lot and try walking on the beach.
Parking lot now closed. Maybe it will be open when I am strong enough to get out.

These are boom times for boredom and the researchers who study it (Washington Post)

In the South there was always a Bible you could memorize chapters from. Don't anyone around me make fun of Louis Untermeyer and his big blue TREASURY OF POETRY. You could memorize passages from Shakespeare plays without ever having seen a copy of those plays. After a school fire there were boxes of books one could paw through and I found a 1990 Henry Holt MACBETH than had been signed Jan. 21, 1913 by Lottie Ray Adams in Tecumseh, Oklahoma. A play that short, you could pretty much memorize. By 1952 I had a Pocket Book (a genuine Pocket Book) Four Great Tragedies, and under a locust tree around cow patties memorized some of KING LEAR. (In 2020, before surgery, I did floor exercises to Anthony Hopkins.) In 1953 I got my one-volume Shakespeare in New Orleans along with the first photograph of me and Andrew Jackson.  When Canty and Deroder (not quite the right name) showed up one afternoon on their go-cart at Singer, Louisiana there was the folded up cot at the South end of the office but on the working part of the great pigeon-holed desk were what Canty hailed as the Bible and Shakespeare, the only alien books in the place. And on 1 January 1956, released from a sanatorium, I had the one-volume Shakespeare to get me through the next five months. OTHELLO? 7 times up through 25 May, and (a miracle) Paul Robeson's LPs 3 times late in May.  One year later, with peneuno-peritoneum I did enact Cassio in the Richmond Community Theater and have a photograph to prove it. How could anyone ever be bored? Back as night telegrapher on the KCS in Port Arthur, I started off taking only 10 units, thinking more might be too hard for a tubercular released on the unsuspecting world. With money coming in, I got Helen Derbyshire's 2 versions of THE PRELUDE and line by line read the earlier version, line by line. What a treasure she gave, Helen Derbyshire. I owned her book until a few weeks ago but it is no longer on the shelf where it had lived. And in late 1957 I could read  LIGHT IN AUGUST imagining that the author was home over in Mississippi, and re-read MOBY-DICK absolutely astounded again that a young American had written it. Well, no movies then (except the black and white version of Olivier's RICHARD THE THIRD, which took over the black and white television for a day), but  Robeson's LPs were long-sustaining. (I finally got to see Uta Hagen, his great co-star, in WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? in NYC at a matinee. Was it early in 1963? One frugal young fellow and a hoard of blue haired ladies were released onto an unprepared street, bewildered and explosive. Not bored. Never bored.

Katherine Stewart, director TWO GENTLEMEN FROM VERONA, starring Josh Hunt

2018 A Strong Recommendation

Now, if you are running very low in Shakespeare for listening to and/or watching while suffering from the TRUMP VIRUS, this would not be your worst bet. Before this, I had never seen a production, although I had listened to a sound recording in the early 2000s. I will not need to see another and I will not need to see this one over again, but I am glad to have seen it, flattened as I was with the TRUMP VIRUS.

Something worth getting outraged about--idiotic paraphrases of Shakespeare on Google and in many Classrooms

Just for fun, as you writhe in pain from the Trump Virus, look at "I have lived long enough" on Google.

When we are sacrificing ourselves because we are in our 80s, can we ask that the vaping grandchildren be sacrificed along with us? You know that they are going to die of the Trump Virus disproportionately, just like us. This is on my mind because the moment I heard of vaping I understood its economic purpose and probable trajectory and said so, loudly. No one paid attention. Last year scientists said vaping might not be Chesterfield-mild to the lungs. For us, it felt like being in Paris on 1988 when French scientists announced their discovery of a link between smoking and lung cancer. So (not speaking personally) I think they should herd all the octogenarians and vaping teens to deep grasses outside of Coffeeville, Kansas, together, and leave us.

Franie Parker-Hale Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) & 3 OTHERS--Dan Patrick knows best

Who can argue with marching the aged into mountainous terrain or into thick traffic and bidding them goodbye? What aged person would be so selfish as to want to live a little longer?

No resuscitation for over 80? Makes perfect sense to me. Imagine those mangled chests.

I have opened my 19 year old eyes to corridors of tuberculars carrying a Dixie cup for spit and ashes from cigarettes as they looked about to see if anyone was newly missing. Not pretty.  Can you imagine corridors lined with resuscitated old folks, on stretchers, opening their eyes to see each other? Where can hospitals put people who are just barely back alive? Trump should pass out his favorite Sharpies marked TRUMP VIRUS SHARPIES to all old folks and have someone else mark their chests DNR. We would mess it up doing it ourselves, even if our brains sort of knew what our fingers were doing. No one is going to be washing it off during rigorous cleanups.

When the President of the United States hails the use of chloroquine phosphate, run to your shed!

From God's lips to their ears and their stomachs and to one death, at least.

Never would I listen to my first mother-in-law's advice on health, but the PRESIDENT? THE PRESIDENT???

HE IS A VERY STABLE GENIUS, THE MAN WHO GAVE ME HIS PERSONAL INVENTION, THE TRUMP VIRUS.

Grim reading? How did she write it? I thought I was sick. This guy is really sick.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/magazine/coronavirus-family.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=The%20New%20York%20Times%20Magazine

Will one or both of them die? Will the cat die?

The Trump Virus Rages On

The brain does not know what the feet are doing and the brain does not know what the fingers are typing. A great new documentary on Yamanoto's crash on Bougainville, Gary Sinise narrating. Then the Ehle / Firth PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. Cousin Jane! Cassandra will show you how we descend from Thos Leigh.

Moreton Bay fig trees in Santa Monica in MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

The opining shot looks mighty like La Mesa Street. One block n of San Vicente.
One of the very best Shakespeare movies ever made. Just saw it again.

Up at 3:30 a.m. with Trump Virus

Terrible night. Sweats and chills. I'll see if I can get back to the top floor.

Lordy, I remember reading TIMON OF ATHENS while in a TB sanatorium, a spiral-house where in fact ulcerous sores were visible. That was then, 1955, in Louisiana.

Who is Daniel Patrick and who gives him the right to sacrifice me and the other victims of Trump Virus and the Dismal Dow?

Beto O'Rourke

✔@BetoORourke

This kind of numbnuttery will kill people in Texas. Young as well as old. We need a state-wide shelter in place order to stop the spread of coronavirus and save hundreds of thousands of lives. https://

I keep trying to get the caregiver to take a picture of me grinning and holding 2 thumbs up, the sign that I am determined to survive the Trump Virus. Then along comes Daniel Patrick . . . .

I have not found the 1995 Harvard letter yet

The one explaining how the staff rewrote every submitted manuscript to make it worthy of the Harvard name. They made no charge for this, and let the putative writer sign the book. What could be more generous?

Down with TRUMP VIRUS. I don't get sick. I don't get bad colds. Every 5 or 6 years, often associated with visits to doctors about something else

I self-isolate by work habits. I write books which now can be written largely from Internet research supplemented by my years of archival research. (This is a change since 1999.) I ran and now walk on the beach, alone. Sometimes I am shocked to see hundreds of people there all going the wrong way. I forgive them and go to the other side,
I don't GO to therapy meetings of any kind because there is no such thing as a no-smokers meeting, certainly not a meeting for people whose clothing and hair has not been around smoke.
I don't go to the civic meetings I fought to attend back 17 years ago, when the mayor blocked the door holding a lighted cigarette behind him in the vet's hall.
And now I am sick with the TRUMP VIRUS because I had to go to a doctor's office several times a week.

I know for certain that what I have is the TRUMP Virus because in all SLO county there is no way of testing for it

Tylenol, Tylenol, Tylenol, Tylenol.

Everyone who comes down with this damn thing should call it the TRUMP VIRUS.

He is the one who put his head in the sand and said there would be a miracle. TRUMP VIRUS IS A LOT EASIER TO SAY THAN CORONOVIRUS OR COVID WHATEVER.
Let's all agree: if you begin to get sick, while you can still go on the internet, identify the damn thing.

In among old papers I am sorting A & S

HH on the Kraken Introduction

A lot was going on. That day Bill Regier and I agreed that Johns Hopkins would publish the 2 volumes of the biography.

Left message at Harvard apologizing but withdrawing the manuscript. I was pissed because the editor had gone off to the Cape rather than reading my sample. I hope I can find the letter someone at Harvard wrote to me. How can I recollect? Well, it said I should be grateful because they have a great staff that re-writes all manuscripts that are submitted. I could be very sure that all infelicities would be removed. It went on that way. No way in Hell, I thought, no way in Hell will you ever publish a book of mine, even if your happy campy editor ever takes care of business.

Eagle in flight; eagle coming toward me, just earlier

Box 86 packed. Ten ready to tape when we become ready to tape

I liked Joe a lot when he stood up to the auto worker a couple of weeks ago. Why is Sanders suddenly portraying himself as a hard working Senator?

 Bernie Sanders exploded into expletives when asked Wednesday if he would pull the plug on his ailing campaign.

“I’m dealing with a f—ing global crisis,” the Vermont senator, back on Capitol Hill to vote on the $1 trillion Coronavirus bailout package, blew up at a veteran CNN reporter when pressed on the future of his White House bid after being thumped by Joe Biden in Tuesday night’s primaries.

"Oh, it never occurred to us that people would want to smoke there!" Duh! Duh!

Young people after rain--45 degrees or so

85 Contains basket with 1990 drafts of V2 chapters taken up 1998 or so

I thought I had better make a draft of the 2nd volume just in case I was so saddened by what I had to tell that I could not write the first volume. The great problem was to keep the second volume from being relentless misery.

For several weeks I have been lamenting that all my stamina was gone. Bad Timing!

The surgery a month ago seems likely to have been a success, longterm, but the weeks afterward were debilitating, day by day, until a few days ago, and still, sort of. I have been to the beach a few times but done no floor exercises and simply can't, not if I am going to pack any boxes (#83 coming up). Now word is that people in their 80s die of cornoaviric at a much higher rate than younger people. Chronic lung disease? Well, does arrested Tuberculosis count? Mainly, the post-surgical process took every scrap of strength out of me. I was looking forward to building stamina back up, slowly. Can anyone be more self-quarantining than I am? Well, yes . . . .  I don't want to be ambushed now. After the BOXING is done, I really want to get to ORNERY PEOPLE.

Sorry I recycled my 24 1973 rolls of Nixon tapes--other people could have used them

24 rolls of TP for Recycling. Why did I save these all these decades?

From my long long fight for a smoke free workplace

The Hell I went through at the University of Delaware from Smokers

I finally felt in 1998 that I could live on Social Security, taken as early as I could, and the TIAA-CREF pension. Away from daily assaults, I could finish volume two of my biography.

HH's Sept. 1995 declaration

Hayford's letter July 1995 after reading all Vol. 1 in a week in Landenberg.

I can't send this off to the Berkshire Athenaeum without trying to make a copy of it.

What can I do? I have been robbed. Dana Milbank has taken over my Sanders Spoiler Watch

Dana Milbank:
And so today, I begin a new feature: the Spoiler Watch. It will track the campaign of vanity and self-aggrandizement the once-idealistic Sanders candidacy has now become. Everything Sanders does from this point on — until he eventually (hopefully) throws his support to Biden — will be to the benefit of a grateful President Trump.


ALL I CAN SAY IS THAT SINCE HE HAS TAKEN OVER MY SPOILER WATCH HE HAD BETTER STAY ALERT!

The malignity that you come across as you throw out old salary sheets

It took 5 years to get anything resembling an apology and a pittance of financial make-up. I thought I had to fight year after year because of the enormity of the misuse of power by Flynn when he was acting chairman. The idea of not counting my speeches--all very original and powerful speeches that went into FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS and other publications.  The idea of not counting my service on AMERICAN LITERATURE, a very heavy professional workload! MEASURE FOR MEASURE--Man, proud man, dressed in a little brief authority, plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as makes the angels weep. I quote from memory which may be askew.

More misc photos--Sendak in Lenox 1991; NO in 1988

Fewer and fewer boxers up here to go through. Garage?

Will it Happen Again? Nine Months After the Lights Went Out in 1977 . . . .

Will Home Quarantines have some benign and also some tragic consequences? Are Male MAGA Americans qualified to Home Quarantine themselves honorably? 

$100! Late 1956.

After the morning rain

More unidentifiable photographs

Sanders wins Northern Mariana Islands caucuses

Somebody, somewhere, DOES like him.

Mr. Belafonte’s personal archive, acquired by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, provides a snapshot of a life that mingled art and activism.

The first LP I ever bought, in 1956, I bet I still have.

Another bet: Harry is not packing every box himself, Day-O, Day-O.

Tally-man has been tallying my bananas for how many months now? Box 78 not finished. Will the boxing end before I do?

I saw ISLAND IN THE SUN in the Gulf town of Port Arthur in 1958. Not every southern town allowed Joan Fontaine and Harry Belafonte to be standing close to each other and talking. They were beautiful and young, and they both lasted a very long time.

31 January 1981-the year off from U of DE to write FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS

Zack Bowen asked me, abruptly, to apply for something that was being started so I wrote a proposal in ball point ink on half a page of paper, not thinking about it for more than a minute. Heaven help us! Zack got me a year off at full pay. My neighbors in Wilmington could not make sense of it. I was not going to Newark this week, and not next week either?  Had a been fired and was I bluffing it out? I had not written the Guggenheim book so this was the book for both the delayed Guggenheim book and the new Delaware Research and Teaching Fellowship 1981-82 Award. This was an astonishing gift. Most of the book was written on the Marine Science $20,000 Wang computer, which I was allowed to write on, after a time. Jerry Graff  asked for the manuscript at a cocktail party in Los Angeles. It was published from disks by Northwestern University Press, after copy-editing by Alma MacDougall. I had to retired in 1998 in order to have time for the second volume of my Melville biography, a project not thought of in 1981. What a boon this was! It allowed me to make sense of all I had learned in the 1970s and be ready to move on to another activity.

Photos of the girls Illinois, Calif., and East Coast

By water July 1981
Photobooth: 29 Aug 1973
Rocking chair with 2 girls 2nd week of December  1967

Misc old photos in boxes where they had no place being--one shot saving

September 1962, NYC, after a hard summer's research, 168 lbs
At pigeon-hole desk in Singer, LA depot with idiotic pipe and one-vol Shak 1953
At Menaggio in 1984 after Roma had failed to be the champion of the world
In a busy street by the Singer depot 1953
Looking South with Sendak in Lenox 1991

At 50, a runner

Picture taken last year or so, undated

In 1983 FLAWED TEXTS & VERBAL ICONS was set from my Mighty Disks, not Input by hand

Thanks to Jerry Graff for realizing what I had produced and what  Alma MacDougall and I had presented to him.

I see from writing on a little envelope from W. W. Norton that I had a moment of relief from labor. Study of the creative process had been banned from textual scholarship. "Delegating authority" is a popular concept I demolish in the book.

Believe this???----Jeff Weaver, senior adviser to the Sanders campaign: "If Joe Biden is the nominee, Bernie Sanders will support him wholeheartedly, campaign for him."

I remember 2016. I do not believe that Sanders is capable of acting like a Democrat. Why? He is not and has never been a Democrat. He has no more respect for a Democratic President like Obama than he has for Richard Nixon. He has no loyalty to anyone but himself. He is also obsessively vain, a man who wants worshippers and counts them as his personal subjects. My little Revolutionaries, don't work for mean old ambitious incompetent Hillary! I have never fotgotten that night in Philadelphia when he lied to his crowd, saying that Hillary that morning had said he was incompetent to be President. No, he screamed, "Hillary is incompetent to be President," and the crowd chanted after him. Now, you remember what happened? In those days news people did not do fact checks. That morning, a reporter had tried to goad Hillary into saying Sanders was unqualified. She was too smart to let him trap her. But Sanders heard some version of what had happened and decided to LIE about her.
Any time that man promises to play nicely, be careful. He will drop scorpions into the sandbox. He does not know how to play with others. Jeff Weaver, check your pocketbook and count your toes.

While packing, another find: in 1975 Alison took a telephone message from Ron Gottesman

Ronald Gottesman (1933-2010, long long dead like so many others) had been to LA to interview at USC. The dean was David Malone.  Gottesman understood how to phrase his message so the pertinent part would leap out.

"It's good to see you looking so strong, Mr. Biden." What I said to him in 1988.

That was in AMTRAK Wilmington, DE, a while after the aneurysm. It was good to see him looking strong in 1988.
Sanders in his selfish vanity gave the 2016 election to Trump. Now I say it again, after Michigan, Missouri, and Mississippi yesterday: "IT'S GOOD TO SEE YOU LOOKING SO STRONG, MR BIDEN."

Something sick about clicking on Mississippi Election Results 3 times?

Well, there was this fellow, never a Democrat, who kept on and on out of vanity and gave an election to Trump. Does he not realize that if California had voted two weeks later the results would have been more like Idaho if not more like Michigan 2020? Let me see what happens when I click again on Mississippi Election Results.

A man I know saw a Frank Furness mantel a Freight Elevator of the Phila Architectural Salvage Building

He paid the asking price, $650 or $700, took it down in the elevator to the main floor, and hoisted it on his shoulder and walked to his car. The sides stayed attached. The mantel is very like one of the best in the Physick House in Cape May, pretty plainly by Daniel Pabst. (I did not see a good picture just now.) I admire anyone who sees a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and acts then.

This is a simple one but with some of the same features. The Physick one is better.

Sometimes for the very old, a surgery that you absolutely have to have, if you are going to live

in any sort of acceptable condition for any length of time--sometimes that surgery so devastatingly debilitates an old person that all stamina evaporates. There comes a point when you decide the surgery is probably working and you wish you were robust enough to welcome it and confident enough to figure out how to regain some strength so you can live to enjoy it. Sometimes. 

Robert Shore, artist for the Cover of the 2006 Norton Critical Edition of THE CONFIDENCE-MAN

Robert Shore did a suite of painting for an abortive edition of the book in the early 1970s. I did the Introduction, and later salvaged it (much revised) as "The Confidence Man's Masquerade" in the 2006 edition.  Shore was able to go to the Norton offices in 2006 to negotiate. He had to be reminded of the illustrations--understandably! In packing now I find things I have no recollection of! Shore died in 2014 at 90.

Gretchko, others, is this the Gansevoort NY house?

Stray cat

No jolly playmates, no surly playmates, in light rain--Met NO ONE going or coming.

Waited 33 minutes on 800 726-0190 then dialed again and got HOT LADIES. Did not wait for customer service

It is outrageous to make customers beg for attention. We have the receipt for the faulty toaster. We even have the BOX for it. We are that sort of people. What we are not, are people who want to start the week holding a phone for a couple of hours.

Or maybe they will "tank her" in a joint news conference the way she "tanked" Bloomberg "on purpose."

During a “Saturday Night Live” sketch, Senator Elizabeth Warren was reminded that Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders were both hoping for her endorsement. “It’s tough,” she said. “Maybe I’ll just pull a New York Times and endorse them both.”

I am still very upset about the loss of character in deliberately "tanking" someone.

Alison and Sabrina 29 August 1973

Mysterious bumper stickers--Only a desperate fanatic would have put these on an automobile

Unidentified subject of 5 January 1979 photograph

The Pro-Smoking viciousness that the administration countenanced at the University of Delaware--overlapping text here

• The Chairman (Dawson) told me that he could not ask his elderly female secretary to go outside to smoke even though OSHA (when I GOT OSHA there) said her smoke went straight up into my cubicle.
• The Librarian was the worst. She allowed smoking at every access point and in particular let her dozen or so of female employees to smoke lined up along the building to the south of the Front Doors. If you have been to Paris you can imagine what they looked like.
• The Librarian was so concerned to cater to Middle Eastern students that she designated a room on the 3rd floor as the SMOKING ROOM for them and others. Of course, the smoke always got so bad that they had to open the door so they could breathe and let the whole library fill with smoke.
• Finally, I retired early, at a significantly lower pension that I could have had if I had stayed and have scratched out a happy almost smoke-free life here in the Central Coast of California.
• One anecdote. After the building I taught in was at last supposedly smoke free I was in a large amphitheater, in the pit, not at the top. In was an hour and 15 minutes class. At 12 noon I would begin to get sick. Students nearby said they could smell nothing, nothing. What was wrong with me? Well, what was wrong was that smoke was sickening me. Charlie Robinson went down the hall opening every door and found a female employee who on the stroke of 12 rushed into a closet to light up, every day. As OSHA found, there were no obstacles, so her smoke funneled right down to me.
• I fought and I fought and I fought and I lost.