What a pleasant surprise--the Gallimard MOBY-DICK with Illustrated Life and Works by Hershel Parker

 

This is a picture of Todd Costner

 

Slow 2 mile walk in deep sand / mud at high tide--59 minutes. Heart surgery 24 days ago.

 It's going to take several more days but I will get back to under 50 minutes, I hope.

Meanwhile, thanks to Dr. Panikkath and his four-hour procedure. I want to pass the pulmonary function test and then the stress test.

Lucky, says the Caregiver. You got TB after Streptomycin. Well, yes, after leaving Louisiana, where they had not heard of streptomycin and making my way West. 

Lucky, says the Caregiver. You were dying day by day, deteriorating, a month ago and now you are showing off in the muddy beach. 40 years ago, you would just have died.

Not quite clear yet just how old is the procedure I had, but around 40 years FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS was 1984. The biography was 1996 and 2002. It gives you pause.

Now, the toric intraocular implant has been available to the eye how long? Mine is 6 years or so old, and it survived, intact, the Valley Fever blindness that they thought at Stanford was Lymphoma but was halted by an alert doctor here one millimeter from the macula. I drive legally without glasses. This is wonderful. 

Lucky. Jerry Lee is 87 and if I make it till Thanksgiving I will be 87.

It's terrible for a Depression Okie to have to say, but J. D. Vance is White Trash

 I bought the book when it came out and saw that it was a phony "Look at me, rising by my boot straps" story.  I stopped watching Chris Matthews when he called it as great book. Now the emptiness is on full display. White Trash! Still sucking up to Trump, still buddying with Deniers, sucking up to the man he once called America's Hitler.

20 days after 4-hour heart surgery did a mile (to 41) in 64 minutes

 

The Rock and the Trees today

 Tough going on sand so I crossed at the entrance to the Cloisters over the dunes to the Trees which separate the dunes from the school. First time walking back along the path in many months. Many dogs all on leashes. More than a mile and a quarter--two and a half weeks after heart surgery.

The Pulitzers are in Danger!!!!

 Mary Papenfuss

Sun, October 23, 2022 at 12:20 AM

(Photo: Brandon Bell via Getty Images)

(

Donald Trump announced at his Texas rally Saturday that he is going to “sue” within two weeks to snatch away Pulitzer Prizes from The Washington Post and The New York Times for coverage of the Kremlin’s interference in America’s 2016 presidential election.

“Within the next two weeks, we’re suing the Pulitzer organization to have those prizes taken back,” Trump crowed at a rally in Robstown, where he stumped for MAGA candidates.

He said Pulitzer Prizes should be going to Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Jeanine Pirro.

Not what I wanted to see after heart surgery!

 Walked very slowly more than a mile, to Cloisters boardwalk entrance & back

The Caretaker's childhood friend on stopping freight trains.

 There was some concern here this morning at my setting off to the beach after heart surgery. The childhood friend in Seattle said, "You can't stop a freight train."

Told this on my safe return, I huffed and puffed: "With my little flag or my fusee (day or night) I stopped many a freight train when I was a depot agent and railroad telegrapher."

Have a little respect!

Welcome home--washing sand off bottoms of shoes then looking down for socks to dust off--only to be welcomed home

 

Forgot cap

 

FIRST VISIT TO THE BEACH SINCE 5 AUGUST--walked only to Duck Creek and back

 

Not me 30 years ago but Todd Costner, my Young Doppelganger

 

ANTI-SEMITISM HAS BECOME NORMAL. I laughed at this survey of Post-War Jewish Professors in 2012 because of the high class company I was in, but it's not funny now. Listen to Trump this week. Listen to the Republican voices defending Hitler.

 

11 July 2012--The Tablet--with additions in square brackets.

           As late as the 1930s, while Jews made up more than their share of Ivy League students—and would have been even more overrepresented if not for quotas—they were still virtually absent from the English faculty.

          Then, almost overnight, everything changed. Starting in the postwar years, anti-Semitism became intellectually unrespectable, thanks to its association with Nazism and the Holocaust, while the flood of new students entering the universities under the G.I. Bill meant that there was an urgent need for new faculty. Jewish professors, critics, and scholars were newly acceptable—Lionel Trilling [born 1905] studied Arnold at Columbia, and Harry Levin [born 1912] studied Joyce at Harvard. Leon Edel [born 1907] wrote the biography of Henry James, and Hershel Parker [born 1935] wrote the biography of Melville. Alfred Kazin [born 1915] recovered the history of the American novel in On Native Grounds, a title whose defiant claim could not be missed.

Mike Abrams and his successors. Sometimes I need to laugh.

 

Monday, November 18, 2019

What splendid company. Mike Abrams, Lionel, Harry, Hershel, Leon, and Alfred

M.H. Abrams, 2009.(Dale R. Corson)

M.H. Abrams, the distinguished literary critic, died April 22, at age 102. This appraisal of the man and his work by Tablet’s Adam Kirsch originally appeared on July 11, 2012, on the occasion of M.H. Abrams’ 100th birthday. 

***

When Henry James paid a visit to his native country in 1905, after decades living in Europe, he was struck with a kind of pious horror by the spectacle he found on the Lower East Side of New York City. As a novelist, James was bothered most of all by his fear of what these “swarming” Jews would mean for the future of the English language in America. Visiting Yiddish cafés, he saw them “as torture-rooms of the living idiom; the piteous gasp of which at the portent of lacerations to come could reach me in any drop of the surrounding Accent of the Future.” To James, the English language and English literature were the inalienable possession of the Anglo-Saxon race—a common feeling that persisted long after James wrote. As late as the 1930s, while Jews made up more than their share of Ivy League students—and would have been even more overrepresented if not for quotas—they were still virtually absent from the English faculty.

Then, almost overnight, everything changed. Starting in the postwar years, anti-Semitism became intellectually unrespectable, thanks to its association with Nazism and the Holocaust, while the flood of new students entering the universities under the G.I. Bill meant that there was an urgent need for new faculty. Jewish professors, critics, and scholars were newly acceptable—Lionel Trilling studied Arnold at Columbia, and Harry Levin studied Joyce at Harvard. Leon Edel wrote the biography of Henry James, and Hershel Parker wrote the biography of Melville. Alfred Kazin recovered the history of the American novel in On Native Grounds, a title whose defiant claim could not be missed.

This morning's skillet bread

 

A Tragic Real Estate Story--from $83,500 to 19,500,00

 

This is Milch's Life's Work: "When the Brentwood house was first on the market, a woman wrote to Rita and said she had driven past and then had parked and walked up and looked at the house and the yard and the trees and wanted to raise her kids there. That’s what Rita had done, and it gave her pleasure to imagine this woman making a life there for her family. We sold her the house, and . . . Rita and I moved to a smaller rental farther south. The family who bought the old house in Brentwood demolished it. The thing that upset Rita most wasn’t the destruction of the house itself, or even that the woman lied, it was that she tore down the trees."

Well, my daughter Sabrina drove by it and wept. Nothing was there. Chain link fence, I think she said, and bare dirt. 

So it was a vacant lot for years before becoming the most expensive house in a 2nd rate block.

Starchitect Richard Landry’s home fetches record price in Brentwood neighborhood

9,500 sf property in South of San Vicente enclave goes for $19.5M

Los Angeles /

June 22, 2022 10:30 AM

By Andrew Asch

Memories and realities about "this old Spanish house."

 

The Milch family had lived in a small house south on the same street, Princeton over in Santa Monica which at Montana became Moreno. Milch describes the transition:

    "When Ben was born in 1986 we bought a house in Brentwood. There were six weeks when we were waiting to move that we lived in a hotel on Wilshire, and the tight quarters were wearing. . . . We were lucky the Moreno Avenue house was ready when it was. It was this old Spanish house, built in the 1930s, and Rita made it beautiful. There were old palm trees all around and Rita planted what she tells me was a California pepper in the front, liquid amber trees in the backyard that changed color, a lot of vines and jasmine that grew up the walls. It was all alive."

"Old palm trees?" None I ever saw! The house was old but already beautiful, you know from pictures I have posted. What Rita did was transform the yard (oh, that pool! and the trees) and greatly enlarge the house. I imagine her walking into that narrow old kitchen and saying, "Blow this out toward 26th Street!" and she blew out the west side of the second floor too. She made it enormous and "all alive."

David Milch's LIFE'S WORK mentions who got my wonderful study.

 

"There was a guesthouse where she could paint and I could put people up."

Rita got it. I had read that he did not use a conventional study but lay on the floor, surrounded by staff, dictating. It worked for him.

After heart surgery October 2022

 

This is not a 30-year old picture of me. It is Todd Costner, now, cheering up someone he loves.

 

Discharged from hospital noon yesterday; made skillet bread early today.

 

That little procedure we have been begging for these 2 months--one that may give me more years of life.

 

Yesterday morning, extreme lecture on the possibilities. The Electrician might get the 3 wires up there only to find that the PVC is not behaving badly--not behaving at all. Then he might on another day have to run the wiring up, all over again. If he gets there and finds something to burn, I being old might have a stroke or die on the table. Poor Heddy. Then the "procedure" (not an intimidating-sounding "operation") started after all. It normally takes a couple of hours. This one took four. Mildly sedated, I was aware of it all but did not feel any tubes going up the chest to the heart. What he found was that the offending node was right by the atrioventricular node, the one which passes on the command of the sinoatrial node.. RIGHTBY. So he had to nibble nibble at the DVC nub without damaging the AV node. It looks as if he succeeded. This means that little by little, hour by hour, my oxygen-deprived mind may come part way back.You can come back but not all the way back, says someone.I think this all means that at first I may remember Tippi Hedren but not her daughter but might someday remember Melanie Griffith also. I think it means that in a few days I can start walking on the beach, maybe half way to Duck Creek at first, then to Duck Creek a few times, then to the Cloister entrance at the start of the Trees, and in a while to 41, my old goal.  [If he had destroyed the AV node, he could immediately put in a humanly-designed pacemaker. THEN I would have been eligible for a pacemaker.] Now for the horror show: Big sign on wall in the hospital: SILENCE IS HEALING IN 3-BED ROOM, ONE PATIENT PLAYED FOX TV 3-11 pm THEN PLAYED IT AGAIN AFTER the 1 AM ROUSTING AND the 6 AM ROUSTING I TRIED CUTE LITTLE EARPLUGS AND PILLOW ON ONE SIDE AND COVER ON THE OTHER BUT I HEARD EVERY WORD OF EVERY AD AND EVERY PASSIONATE SPEAKER. As we left he was siting at the end of the bed on the phone, with his little powerful TV blasting 2 feet away. THEN THEY WOUND ME UP AND SET ME OUTSIDE TO WANDER AS A MAGA MAN MAGA MAN MAGA MAN. Yesterday the surgery and the night in the hospital. This picture tonight of living guy.   GET OUT OF THE WAY!

Something I came across just now--Johns Hopkins and the Sendak illustrations of my Melville biography

 

If I ever knew I forgot about Burris's visit to Sendak.

May 14, 2012

With Melville bio, JHU Press entered the world of Sendak

            The wild rumpus, university-press style, started in 1996, when The Johns Hopkins University Press prepared to publish the first volume of Hershel Parker’s magisterial biography of Herman Melville. As an eminent Melville scholar and editor of the Northwestern-Newberry Writings of Herman Melville, Parker knew just about everyone in the close community of Melville experts, collectors and devotees. Singular among them, perhaps, was the renowned illustrator and children’s book author Maurice Sendak, who died on May 8. “There’s a mystery there,” Sendak once said of Melville’s writing, “a clue, a nut, a bolt, and if I put it together, I find me.”

            At Parker’s request, Sendak completed two portraits of Melville, both pen-and-ink drawings with watercolor wash, that appear in the JHU Press editions of Herman Melville: A Biography published in 1996 and 2002. Sendak brought his lifelong appreciation of the writer, along with characteristic depth and playfulness, to the illustrations that serve as both jacket art and frontispiece for the two volumes. For volume one, which covers 1819 to 1851, Sendak depicts the young Melville in handsome profile with ship’s rigging in the background, holding a writer’s quill in his hand and wearing a top hat decorated with a whimsical yellow flower. The illustration for the second volume, which spans 1851 to 1891, shows an older, more somber Melville, entwined in ivy and the cares of later life.

            JHU Press designer Glen Burris, who created the jackets and interior designs for both volumes, worked with Sendak as he prepared the illustrations and later got to meet him. “I visited him at his home in Ridgefield [Conn.] in 2002,” comments Burris, “to return the illustration we used on the second volume. Sendak was a Melville fanatic and something of a curmudgeon. He had lots of opinions and could no doubt talk to Hershel Parker about Melville the way another scholar might. But he was also a very gracious host, and I wound up spending the afternoon with him. He showed me his illustrations for Brundibar, which had not yet been published, and his copy of the famous edition of Moby Dick with illustrations by Rockwell Kent. We talked about books and the work of illustrating. He was a wonderful guy.”

            The Melville biography would be a great critical success for the Press and enjoy strong sales. The volumes were lauded by The New York Times and called “an astonishing achievement” by The New Republic. Paperback editions, featuring Sendak’s portraits of Melville, were published by the Press in 2005.